Sorry, horse. Time to cheat again.
There was one lone difference between them, other than sex. Her mare topped his scrubby little gelding by three hands, and outweighed it proportionally. Over a long run that might have given him an advantage; all that weight could slow her horse down.
But out of the starting blocks the advantage was all hers—the more especially since her mare was a lot fresher than his beast. She spurred the mare after him; they had him in less time than it took to breathe. And she used the other advantage of her bigger horse: she rammed the gelding with her mare's shoulder; literally bowled him over and rode them both down.
As the gelding went over she heard bones snap, and heard it scream in agony—heard him scream too, as he went down trapped under the weight of his horse, and as her mare stepped on him at least once. And then he gurgled and wailed behind her as the gelding began to thrash in pain.
That was no way to leave even an enemy.
She wheeled the mare around, and saw the gelding spasming wildly in the dust, saw the nomad clawing at it in mindless agony with one arm flopping useless and the leg he had free still lying over the horse's barrel like a thing of wood. Two paces closer and she could smell him—and knew his back was broken.
That was no way to leave anyone.
She dismounted, walked over, and dealt with it.
And when she looked around, after cleaning her knife on the dead gelding's hide, she saw the others in the ambush party staring at her with a mixture of approval and fear, as if they were wondering if she was now going to perform some kind of trophy-taking on the body. And she saw that the only ones left standing were wearing red and black.
It was over.
"You look like you took the first layer of skin off," Ardun observed, filling the mugs before him with wine—Kasha's full, his half full. He pushed the mug across the little table between them, then sat back in his chair, cradling his own mug in both hands.
"I feel like I have," she said, taking her wine and gulping down half of it. "I thought I'd never get the smell of blood out of my nose."
He nodded; candles on the table between them softened his age-lines and made him look younger; about her age. "Took me that way too. I'd come out of a fight and scrub for an hour or more—then I'd go find Felaras and she'd get me drunk and I'd bawl like a baby."
"Just like you do for me," Kasha observed.
Ardun shrugged, and a breeze from the open window behind him made the candle-flames flicker. "When you get battle-fever the way we do, you need somebody steady around you after—somebody who gets drunk on death like you do, who can tell you that you aren't an animal for feeling that way." He gave her a long look over the top of his mug. "And somebody who won't let you rape him."
She laughed shakily, and ran her fingers through her damp hair. "You got that right. First time it happened, if you hadn't been around, I'd have taken Teo right there in the courtyard. Poor Teo. He was only worried for me, and glad to see me back alive. He thought I was angry with him. He never knew how close he came to being raped in public. Gods, that makes me feel like some kind of savage. An animal; a brute beast."
Ardun shook his head at her. "You know what it is—your body figuring out you just escaped dying, and trying to force you into procreation before you go put it in harm's way again. Your body thinks your duty to the world is to leave a copy of yourself if you go out in glory. So do you listen to your body or your mind?"
"My mind, of course. That is why I'm here in your room and not in Zorsha's."
"And here I thought it was because you wanted my -company."
Kasha laughed shakily.
"And I'll tell you again, because you need to hear it; no, you aren't an animal because you get drunk on killing, or because you're ready to jump anything male in sight when it's over. The fever is just your body again—trying to keep itself from getting killed, it makes you drunk so that you don't think, you just react. You're not an animal, because when it's all over, you agonize over your reactions. Zetren doesn't—he is an animal, a rabid one. And if it weren't that he's useful to the Order, I'd have contrived an accident for him a long time ago."
Kasha nodded soberly; Ardun was far more than the Sword Leader—he was a past master at every assassination technique the Order had ever encountered. Some he taught everyone. Some he taught privately. Kasha had gotten some of that private tutelage, as had others. One of those others, and she had no idea who, would be Ardun's successor. That wouldn't be known until he died, and they opened his papers to see who he had left a certain little set of "tools" to. And whoever became his successor would secretly choose and train another.
So if tiny, wizened Ardun decided that Zetren needed disposing of—it would be done. And only Ardun would know that it had been no accident. Because if he ever did eliminate Zetren, it would be in a way that would leave nothing suspicious.
"You're not drinking," Ardun pointed out, breaking into her thoughts. "You're supposed to be getting drunk."
"I daren't get too drunk," she admitted. "Just enough to believe I'm all right. I've got guard on Felaras and the boy tonight, and I'm getting uneasy feelings. . . ."
She paused long enough to empty her mug and hold it out to him for refilling.
"Ill-wishing?" he asked.
"I think. But getting at the Master indirectly. There's just too damned much going on, and it's all muddled. Like there's a half-dozen plots going on that are not quite lurching into each other."
"Could be. It's like that last siege, when Kyle was Master. I remember the same feeling. Like there's something behind the door that hasn't made up its mind to try breaking in, but you can hear it breathing."
"Ardun—did the fever take you during siege-fighting too?" she asked, curious, and with the wine making her bolder than she might otherwise have been. The siege—the last in the history of the Order—had been long before her time. Felaras had been no more than one of Kyle's possible successors, and Ardun had only just been promoted to full Sword status.
He shook his head. "It wasn't that kind of fighting. Mostly I didn't even see the results of what I did. I was one of the ones chosen to sneak out the escape tunnels, infiltrate the army, and doctor the food supplies. What I did didn't even have any effect until the next afternoon."
"Aconite in the spiced meat?" she guessed.
He nodded, his face gone inward-looking as he called up past memories. "And ground glass in the salt, ergot in the flour, jimson weed in the fodder. Then Kyle up on the tower right after they'd eaten at noon, calling down death and madness on the besiegers. It was pretty damned impressive, let me tell you; he timed it to a hair. Between the ones dropping over dead and the ones taken by fits—and then even the horses going wild—your common soldier was pretty impressed with our direct line to heaven. Then we let loose with the mortars, which we hadn't used yet. We didn't hit much but the command tent; it was the only thing we could range on, but having the commander's quarters go under heavenly retribution was damned disheartening for them. That's why the Yazkirn, at least, don't condemn us as heretics, and haven't disturbed the sister-house we have down there. They figure we're under some kind of divine protection—by their theology, the powers of darkness can't strike at high noon."
Some of that Kasha had already known, but some was new. This was the first time she'd ever found Ardun willing to talk about it, and Felaras didn't even want to hear about the subject, much less talk about it. "Weren't you risking them getting those doctored supplies at morning meal?"
He shook his head. "No, that was what made it work so well. You can set a clock by the Yazkirn army cooks. Oat-and--barley porridge for breakfast, because they've cooked it the night before in big kettles. Stuffed rolls at noon, because they can be handed out to those on patrol. Two each, one spiced meat, one root-vegetable, and the men are known to trade, so some would have gotten a double-dose of aconite and some nothing but the ergot in the flour or the glass in the salt, and some nothing at all, depending on whether the barrels we doctored were close to being empty. We didn't doctor anything that wasn't already open."