“I ran,” the Hawk continued unemotionally. “I was very young, I’d never seen one before, and I thought that, since it didn’t have any eyes, it couldn’t follow me. I must have thought at first that it was just an eyeless man. But it came after me, groaning and slobbering, crashing through the woods. I never looked back, but I could hear it behind me, getting closer as I came out of the woods. I ran through the rocks up the hill toward the Convent, and Sister Wellwa was outside, sweeping the path as she always was. And she—she raised her hand—and it was as if fire exploded from her fingers, a ball of red and blue fire that she flung at the nuuwa’s head. Then she caught me up in her arms, and we ran together through the door and shut and bolted it. Later we found places where the nuuwa had tried to chew through the doorframe.”
She was silent; if any of the horror of that memory stirred in her heart, it did not show on her fine-boned, enigmatic face. It was Fawn who shuddered and made a small, sickened noise in her throat.
“It was the only time I saw her do magic,” Starhawk continued after a moment. “When I asked her about it later, she told me she had only grabbed me and carried me inside.”
Across the rim of the untasted cup. Fawn studied the older woman for a moment more. Rumor in the camp had it that the Hawk had once been a nun herself, before she had elected to leave the Convent and follow the Wolf. Though Fawn had never believed it before, something in this story made her wonder if it might be true. There were elements of asceticism and mysticism in Starhawk; Fawn knew that she meditated daily, and the tent was certainly as barren as a nun’s cell. Though a cold-blooded and ruthless warrior, the Hawk was never senselessly brutal—but then, few of the handful of women in Wolfs troop were.
It was on the tip of Fawn’s tongue to ask her, but Starhawk was not a woman of whom one asked questions without permission. Besides, Fawn could think of no reason why anyone would have left the comforts of the Convent to follow the brutal trail of war.
Instead she asked, “Why did she lie?”
“The Mother only knows. She was a very old lady then—she died a year or so after, and I don’t think anyone else in the Convent ever knew what she was.”
Fawn’s tapering fingers toyed with the cup, the diamonds of her rings winking like teardrops in the dim, golden light. Somewhere quite close, a drunken chorus in another tent began to sing.
“All in the town of Kedwyr, A hundred years ago or more, There lived a lass named Sella...”
“I have often wondered,” Fawn said quietly, “about wizards. Why is Altiokis the only wizard left in the world? Why hasn’t he died, in all these years? What happened to all the others?”
Starhawk shrugged. “The Mother only knows,” she said again. As ever, her face gave away nothing; if it was a question that had ever crossed her mind, she did not show it. Instead she slapped the deck of cards before Fawn. “Bank?”
Fawn shuffled deftly despite her fashionably long, tinted fingernails. It was one of the first things she had learned when she’d been sold to Sun Wolf two years ago as a terrified virgin of sixteen—mostly in self-defense, since the Wolf and Starhawk were cutthroat card players.
Watching her, Starhawk reflected how out of place the girl looked here. Fawn—whose name had certainly been something else before she’d been kidnapped en route from her father’s home in the Middle Kingdoms to a finishing school in Kwest Mralwe—had clearly been brought up in an atmosphere of taste and elegance. The clothes and jewelry she picked for herself spoke of it. Starhawk, though raised in an environment both countrified and austere, had done enough looting in the course of eight years of sieges to understand the difference between new—rich tawdriness and quality. Every line of Fawn spoke of fastidious taste and careful breeding, as much at odds with the nunlike barrenness of Starhawk’s living quarters as she was with the rather barbaric opulence of the Chief’s.
What had she been? the Hawk wondered. A nobleman’s daughter? A merchant’s? Those white hands, delicate amid their carefully chosen jewelry, had certainly never handled anything harsher than a man’s flesh in all her life. The loveliest that money could buy, Starhawk thought, with a wry twinge of bitterness for the girl’s sake—whether she wanted to be bought or not.
Fawn laid the cards down, undealt. In repose, her face looked suddenly tired. “What’s going to become of him. Hawk?” she asked quietly.
Starhawk shrugged, deliberately misunderstanding. “I can’t see the Chief being crazy enough to get mixed up in any affair having to do with magic,” she began, and Fawn shook her head impatiently.
“It isn’t just this,” she insisted. “If he goes on as he’s doing, he’s going to slip up one day. He’s the best, they say—but he’s also forty. Is he going to go on leading troops into battle and wintering in Wrynde, until one day he’s a little slow dodging some enemy’s axe? If it isn’t Altiokis, how long will it be before it’s something else?”
Starhawk looked away from those suddenly luminous eyes. Rather gruffly, she said, “Oh, he’ll probably conquer a city, make a fortune, and die stinking rich at the age of ninety. The old bastard’s welfare isn’t worth your losing sleep over.”
Fawn laughed shakily at the picture presented, and they spoke of other things. But on the whole, as she dealt the cards, Starhawk wished that the girl had not touched that way upon her own buried forebodings.
Sun Wolf felt, rather than heard, the woman’s soft tread outside his tent; he was watching the entrance when the flap was moved aside. The woman came in with the wild sea smell of the night.
With the lamps at his back, their light catching in his thinning, dust-colored hair and framing his face in gold, he did look like a sun wolf, the big, deadly, tawny hunter of the eastern steppes. The woman put back the hood from her hair.
“Sheera Galernas?” he asked quietly.
“Captain Sun Wolf?”
He gestured her to take the other chair. She was younger than he had thought, at most twenty-five. Her black hair curled thickly around a face that tapered from wide, delicate cheekbones to a pointed chin. Her lips, full almost to the corners of her mouth, were sensual and dark as the lees of wine. Her deep-set eyes seemed wine-colored, too, their lids stained violet from sleepless nights. She was tall for a woman and, as far as he could determine under the muffling folds of her cloak, well set up.
For a moment neither spoke. Then she said, “You’re different from what I had thought.”
“I can’t apologize for that.” He’d put on a shirt and breeches and a brown velvet doublet. The hair on the backs of his arms caught the light as he folded his strong, heavy hands.
She stirred in her chair, wary, watching him. He found himself wondering what it would be like to bed her and if the experiment would be worth the trouble it could cost. “I have a proposition for you,” she said at last, meeting his eyes with a kind of anger, defying him to look at her face instead of her body.
“Most ladies who come to my tent do.”
Her skin deepened to clay-red along the cheekbones and her nostrils flared a little, like a horse scenting battle. But she only said, “What would you say to ten thousand pieces of gold, to bring your troop and do a job for me in Mandrigyn?”
He shrugged. “I’d say no.”
She sat up, truly shocked. “For ten thousand gold pieces?” The sum was enormous—five thousand would have bought the entire troop for a summer’s campaign and been thought generous. He wondered where she’d come up with it, if in fact she intended to pay him. The size of the sum inclined him to doubt it.
“I wouldn’t go against Altiokis for fifty thousand,” he said calmly. “And I wouldn’t tie up on a word-of-mouth proposition with a skirt from a conquered city for a hundred, wizard or no wizard.”