Kate Elliott - His conquering sword

"So your brother wins what he wanted, in the end." He stood up, that abruptly, and walked off the carpet. Twenty paces away from the tent, two guards fell in on either side of him. They vanished into the camp.

"Oh, God," said Tess, and started to cry, not just because of him but because ever since the baby had died everything made her cry easily.

Children's laughter rang through the camp.

"Tess! Tess! Come quickly."

Vasha and Katya and Galina raced into view and they halted, panting and giggling, on her carpet.

"Come on!" cried Katya, tugging at Tess's arm and spilling the remains of the tea on Tess's trouser leg and onto the carpet.

"Tess, why are you crying?" Vasha asked. At once the three children hushed and heaved themselves down beside Tess with such attitudes of attentive concern that Tess could not help but laugh at their grave faces.

"It's nothing," she said, wiping her eyes.

"Well, then!" exclaimed Katya, leaping up again. "You must come now!"

"Where is-?" Vasha faltered. He never called Ilya anything, not Uncle, not Ilya, not Bakhtiian and certainly never Father, except to leave a pause where his name went.

Tess waved vaguely in the direction Ilya had gone, not trusting her voice.

"I'll find him," said Galina, and jumped up and ran away.

Tess allowed Vasha and Katya to tug her up and drag her toward Sonia's tent. "But what's going on?" Tess demanded.

On the other side of Sonia's tent, out of sight of Tess's own awning, Josef Raevsky stood with his saber drawn and little Ivan's hand covering his own on the hilt. Ilya arrived just in time to watch with the others as Josef, with Vania's hand guiding his, marked Sonia with his saber, drawing the line of marriage down her cheek, parallel to the scar that had marked her first marriage to Mikhal Yakhov.

Tess burst into tears. A moment later she felt Ilya beside her.

"I'm sorry," he whispered, sliding an arm around her back. "I'm sorry, Tess. It isn't your brother's fault or even his victory, but my own fault, and Her victory, who has paid me back in my own coin."

"Oh, you idiot!" she said through her tears. "I just said I had to go there. I didn't say I wasn't coming back!" She broke away from him and went forward to hug Sonia.

"Well, you don't have to cry!" exclaimed Sonia, laughing at her until her tears stopped. "After all, since I must go into seclusion, you'll have to be in charge of the camp for the next ten days."

"But I don't know how to run the camp-"

"If you'd encouraged Aleksi to marry, you'd have more help, wouldn't you?"

"Oh, thank you," said less, laughing. "Where is Aleksi? He was just here."

"He took one of the guard's horses," said Vasha, "and rode out that way." He pointed, and Tess knew that in that direction lay the Veselov encampment.

"He isn't going to mark her if I'm not there to see, is he? We'd better go."

Sonia laid a hand on Tess's arm, restraining her. "Tess. I think if he'd wanted you there, he would have asked you to come with him. Look how dark it is already. I don't think Aleksi wants a public marking. There'll be enough celebration in ten days."

"Well," said Tess, not knowing whether to be offended or pleased. Aleksi had been her shadow for three years, a steady, reliable presence but in his own way still insecure about his place in the Orzhekov tribe. It was encouraging to see him act on his own at last, and yet it felt odd as well. "Josef." She kissed the blind rider on eitiier cheek. Then she went to consult with Galina and Juli Danov about running the camp. Tonight it was not Aleksi, but Ilya, who shadowed her, sticking close by her, saying little but never letting her out of his sight.

Aleksi returned, alone, much later, but he had a smile on his face.

So they stayed outside Birat for ten days. There was a sudden flood of markings, many of them unmarried riders marking widowed women, and a great celebration at the end of that time, observed by the Habakar from their walls and their fields with apprehension and by the jagged western mountains with supreme indifference.

Aleksi astounded Bakhtiian by demanding his share of the treasure gained from the Habakar kingdom for his services to Bakhtiian, and he sent so much gold and jewels to the Veselov camp that when Svetlana was carried out to the fire to meet her new husband, she was almost as heavily laden in riches as was Sonia Orzhekov. Arina

Veselov had gifted Svetlana with a good tent, much larger than Aleksi's, and Svetlana herself gave wedding gifts to all the children and a beautiful carpet to Tess and Ilya that she and her sister had made, as her wedding gift to them.

"I don't know," said Cara late that evening, while dancing went on around three bonfires, "if I approve of this business of marking the women."

"Oho," said Tess, lifting a hand to touch her own cheek, where she was marked. "Do I detect the superior note of advanced civilizations in your words, Cara?"

"Probably," said Cara. "I suppose we've just found less obviously violent ways to alter our bodies. Tess, do you want to try again for a child?"

"Try again!"

"Charles suggested it, in fact. I think you and Ilya can have a child, with some help from me. A little additional lab work on you, but since you're coming to Jeds, we can do it there. And you'll need a communications implant, too, and Rajiv suggests a mini-chip demi-modeler straight into the cranium with a retinal scan trigger. Charles will send a technician down for that."

"When did Charles suggest that? About me trying again for a child?"

"The morning before he left."

"Hmm." Tess broke away from Cara to go forward and greet and kiss Arina Veselov, who was being carried by on a litter, and then came back. "What scheme is Charles hatching now?"

"Tess! Maybe Charles just acted out of pure sentiment."

Tess considered the possibility. She realized that she had a hard time imagining Charles acting out of anything but expediency. "Well," she admitted, "maybe I'm not always fair to him."

Cara snorted. "How often are we ever fair, to others and even to ourselves? Do you want to put a call in to Charles?"

"No. I know he's safe on Odys. I'll wait until we can get a safe channel from Jeds. He's a damned bastard anyway. Ilya is right. Charles accomplished what he wanted-me to leave the jaran and to accept my duties as his heir whether I wanted to or not-"

"Are you leaving the jaran?" Cara asked without a blink.

"Of course not! I mean, only to go to Jeds for as long as I have to, and I'll have to take jaran with me, a jahar, probably-but I'll come back to the plains as soon as I can."

"Then, my dear, I would advise you not to exaggerate the case. Of course, you must go to Jeds temporarily, but it's become equally important that you return to the jaran."

"Maybe Yuri was right," said Tess, musing.

"Yuri?"

"My brother Yuri. He said that the gods had brought me to the jaran to find him, to reunite us, who were brother and sister in another life. But maybe the gods had other plans. Maybe Yuri was the jaran, what they were before I came, untouched and-oh, I don't want to say innocent. Uncorrupted. And so in the end he died, because of what I brought to him and to them." She shook her head. "He would have hated this."

"The gods usually do," replied Cara, looking grave and amused at the same time.

"Do what?"

"Have other plans."

At first, Tess laughed, but as she stared out at the fires and the musicians and the dancing, the whirl of skirts, the flashing gleam of gold and bronze, the distant torches that rimmed the walls of Birat, she thought of Ilya, who had by his own lights and by the laws of his people already begun the corruption, long before she came. And yet, who was to say if that corruption hadn't begun while Ilya was in Jeds, a Jeds already deeply influenced by Charles? And yet, who was to say if it hadn't begun when a fair-haired Singer named Petre Sokolov marked an ambitious woman who didn't want him, driven by a vision that he was granted from the heavens, of the gods-touched child that he was meant to father?