Kate Elliott - An earthly crown

Feodor blushed.

Vanya laughed again. "Still that way with you? I won't tease you, then. Why don't you just mark her and be done?"

"Would you?"

"Gods, no! She's too good with that saber. No, Orzhekov has been full of mischief since she got here. She has the khaja Elders dancing this way and then that, with her clever words. It's not her who's in the foul mood." A red-shirted man appeared, on foot, at the gate, and hallooed toward them, waving. "You'd better go on," said Vanya, sobering. "You can catch them in two spans." The transfer completed, Vanya took the reins of the blown horse.

"Gods," said Feodor. His blush had faded. "Why did Sibirin send me?"

Vanya grinned again. "Oh, he knows Orzhekov has an eye for you, that's it. He thinks it will soften the blow."

"Gods," murmured Feodor.

Nadine Orzhekov called her jahar to a halt as soon as the scouts brought word that a messenger had been sighted following them. "Look," she said to Tess Soerensen as the rider came in, flanked on either side by scouts, "it's Feodor Grekov. He must have come all the way from the main camp. I wonder what he wants."

"You know damn well what he wants," said Tess irritably. "Sibirin sent him to take me back."

"You can't know that," protested Nadine, but her eyes lit with unholy glee. "You don't suppose Bakhtiian got back already?''

"I hope so." The surge of anger that coursed through Tess at the mention of his name was so strong that it shocked her. Gods, where had it all come from?

"Tess. Tess." Nadine shook her head. "For shame." But her expression belied the words, and she chuckled. "Poor Feodor. He looks terrified."

Feodor's escorts peeled away from him and galloped off from the troop, leaving him to approach Nadine and Tess alone. The other riders, all men, watched surreptitiously but with piercing interest as Feodor drew his horse up beside the two women. Tess felt sorry for him because she knew Nadine would treat him badly. Nadine possessed her own stores of hidden anger.

"Well met, Grekov," said Nadine. "What brings you here?"

He kept his eyes lowered. "Sibirin sent me. With a message."

"Ah, a message," said Nadine wisely, drawing out the pause by fiddling with the closes on the leather pouch strung in front of her saddle. She reached inside, pulled out a rolled-up bundle of yellow parchment, examined it without opening it, and then replaced it.

Tess sighed heavily beside her and said, in Rhuian, "Oh, let the poor man out of his misery, Dina."

Feodor glanced up at her words, hearing their tone but not knowing their meaning, and looked away again as her gaze settled on him.

"You're losing your sense of humor, Tess," replied Nadine in Rhuian.

"Never that!"

Nadine grinned. She turned back to Feodor. "Well enough, Grekov," she said in khush, the language of the jaran. "I can guess what your message is. I suppose you're to return to camp with Tess?"

"Yes."

"Then you'll have to stay with us."

He was surprised enough to look straight at her, eyes widening. "But Sibirin said-"

"Yetra, Niko Sibirin does not order me."

"But Bakhtiian himself ordered-"

"Bakhtiian," said Tess viciously, before she knew she meant to say it, "can go to hell."

Feodor's expression of surprise glazed over, freezing an instant from pure shock, and then he shook it off and addressed Nadine again. As if, thought Tess wryly, what she had just said was beyond response. "Forgive me, tsadra. But Sibirin said that I was to bring your cousin-" He glanced from under lashes at Tess, who knew that her brown hair and green eyes did not resemble Nadine's black hair and eyes at all. "-back to camp before Bakhtiian returned from the coast. And not to return without her.''

"I won't force her to go back now. She doesn't intend to go back until I do. There you are. Will you come with us, then?"

"I have no choice."

Nadine dismissed him with a shrug and signaled the troop to ride. Feodor turned his horse aside to fall in with the ranks as they started forward. Tess looked back to see the young man staring at Nadine. Everyone knew he was in love with her.

Were her own feelings so transparent? With one hand, she traced the curve of her mirror. It took no great skill to see that she had married into an impossible situation, that the confrontation that was bound to come was of her own making. Mostly she was angry at herself; sometimes she felt as if she was constantly holding up that mirror and staring at her own flaws, and she was getting a little tired of it.

"Brooding?" asked Nadine, mocking her, but Tess laughed in reply because she knew Nadine showed affection by being caustic.

And abruptly, the thought triggered in Tess an upwelling of the love, of the heart's warmth, she felt for her family-for Sonia and Katerina and Ivan and Kolia, for Niko and Juli, for Irena Orzhekov, for Nadine; for Aleksi, the brother she had adopted. And, God damn him to hell, for Ilya.

"I shouldn't have done it," said Tess when Nadine halted her jahar in sight of the township of Basille. "I shouldn't have come with you."

"Losing your nerve?"

Tess chuckled. "What do you think? But perhaps the dramatic gesture wasn't the wisest one."

"It will certainly get Ilya's attention, though."

"Damn it, it was just one last thing too many. Yaroslav Sakhalin himself picked me out. He told both Bakhalo and Zvertkov that he wanted me in his jahar. You know what an honor that is! And then before I was ever consulted, Ilya goes around behind my back and tells Sakhalin that I'm to be left where I am: still in training. Still in reserve. He never lets me out of camp except if I'm with him or maybe, maybe, on a safe scouting expedition with Ilya's picked thousand and Aleksi at my right hand."

Nadine looked at Tess's scarlet shirt and black trousers, and then at her own, similar except in the stiff leather shoulder pieces and the pattern of quilting and embroidery running up the sleeves. "It's true," she mused, "that Sakhalin is not the kind of dyan to pick you out in order to curry favor with Ilya. He chose you on your merits, nothing else."

"Thank you."

"Still angry? It was an honor."

"An honor I'm never to receive the fruits of."

"Do you want to fight in battle that much?"

Tess regarded her companion with a rueful smile. Behind Nadine's left ear, where her black hair pulled away into a waist-long braid, began the scar that followed parallel to the line of the braid, all the way down. Nadine's bronze helmet hung from her saddle and her lamellar cuirass was tied on behind, although most of her men wore cuirasses or scale girdles and belts. But then, Nadine preferred to keep her reputation for being reckless.

"No, not that much," Tess admitted. "But you know as well as I do that I can't just have the privileges of my position. I have to accept the dangers as well."

"Otherwise," said Nadine, slipping easily from khush into Rhuian, "you're just a player in a masquerade. All show.''

"Yes, all show. I don't care to live that way. And I'm not jaran. So I don't have to. Ilya keeps forgetting that."

"You're wrong, Tess. He's never forgotten it. That's why he wouldn't let you go to the coast with him."

Tess went pale with anger, and her fingers clenched, and unclenched, on her reins. Zhashi shied sideways, and settled. "The business with Sakhalin was inexcusable," she said in a voice made low by fury. "But to refuse me the journey to the coast to meet Charles-!" She broke off.

Nadine watched for a few moments the interesting spectacle of Tess Soerensen too angry to speak. Then she lifted a hand to signal the jahar forward at a walk. Rather than looking at Tess, Nadine examined the timbered palisade that surrounded Basille, noting its gaps and its open gates and the sudden blur of activity at the gates when the approach of two hundred horsemen was noted by its guards.