Kate Elliott - Jaran

"Will you call me Ilya?" His hands lay still on his horse's neck. His voice sounded as studied and calm as ever. She might have hallucinated that glimpse of shyness.

"If you will call me Tess."

"Perhaps-" He hesitated again, slowly put out a hand. "Clasp friends?"

"I'm not sure I understand."

"It is a mark of friendship. I give my honor into your hands, and you may call on it if you are in need. And your honor into my hands, the same. But it is not a gift to be lightly given or lightly used."

"No," she breathed, staring at him. Here, now, he was asking her to be not only his friend but his equal. "Of course." Her voice shook slightly. "Of course I will clasp friends with you. Ilya." She took his hand in hers.

"I am honored. Tess."

By evening, when they caught up with the others, she felt so pleased with herself that she engaged Cha Ishii in the meaningless, polite, but deviously complex formalities of Chapalii dinner conversation just to test her adroitness. When she tired of that, she collected her blankets and sat out alone, just breathing in the cool air and watching the moon. Behind she could hear the riders laughing, pausing, and laughing again as Bakhtiian told the story of her encounter, no doubt embellishing it with a great deal of exaggeration. After a bit they quieted, and she guessed that a serious council was taking place.

Sometime later Fedya found her. "Tess." He chuckled. "You're a marvel." She could see only the pale oval of his face in the moonlight as he settled down to sit beside her. The night bled all color from his shirt. "To fool Mikhailov. That is the marvel."

"Fedya, how well does Bakhtiian know these men?"

He shrugged. "Mikhailov has been riding against Ilya for years."

"What will they do next?"

He shrugged again, but it was a fatalistic gesture this time. "They'll find out you sent them wrong. We have to prepare."

An insect ran up her hand. She started, shuddering, and shook it off. "Prepare for what?" But even as she said it, she knew what he would reply. If Bakhtiian respected Mikhailov so much, then any battle against him would not fall out as easily as that night skirmish against Doroskayev and his men had. People died in real battles.

"They outnumber us, but we know where they are. We'll choose the ground and ambush them." Perhaps Fedya felt her shiver, though they were not touching. He put his hand on hers, a comforting gesture, but his skin felt cold. "Don't worry," he said softly. "You'll be safe. I promise it."

"Safe," she murmured, and she kissed him, wanting more comfort than that.

They rode for six days, until they came to a range of rugged hills that severed the flat monotony of the plains like a knife. Here they halted, setting up the jahar's tents at the mouth of a canyon and the Chapalii tents what Tess judged to be about a kilometer away in a sheltered hollow. For two nights the riders slept in their tents. On the third, they slept in the scrub. Late on the afternoon of the fourth day, Fedya asked Tess if she would like to go hunting, and Tess, feeling nervous and jumpy, and knowing full well that she had seen no game in these hills, understood the invitation to be a smoke screen for his real intentions. She strapped on her quiver and rode out with him.

Their trail soon led to a rocky overhang close by, but well-hidden from, the Chapalii camp. Bushes and vines screened off the entrance from the casual eye. He pushed them aside and, ducking under the overhanging lip, she went in. Light filtered through the leaves, dappling the bed of moss and grass he had laid for them on the earth. The gesture was so touching and so intimate that she felt embarrassed suddenly, afraid that her feelings for him-tenderness and liking crossed with simple desire-might prove inadequate for his toward her. What if he loved her? She halted on her knees beside the little bed, hands buried in soft moss, knowing that she could never really love him, not as more than a friend and bedmate, not with her entire being. She was not sure anymore if she could love anyone in that way, the way she had thought she had loved Jacques.

Fedya stood just behind her. He laid a hand tenderly on her shoulder. "I made you a song, Anya," he said softly, and then he chuckled, because he had just called her by his wife's name. "Forgive me, Tess. I have not made a song since she died.''

Tess caught her breath, relieved and touched at the same time. "I am honored, Fedya," she said, equally softly, and she felt a sudden warmth toward him, unrelated to their friendship, to their lovemaking, because that inadvertent slip made the truth so evident that she could not believe she had not seen it until now: she had never loved Jacques, just as he had never loved her. She had been infatuated with him, certainly, but love-Fedya had loved his wife. She did not feel diminished because he loved Anya still, though his Anya was dead and he stood here with a different woman. "I hope you will sing it for me."

"For what other reason would I make it, if not to sing it for you?" He knelt across from her, head slightly bowed by the slope of the overhang, and he sang. It was a song about the legendary dyan Yuri Sakhalin who, wounded unto death, had come to beg healing from the daughter of the sun.

Tess stretched out and leaned on her elbows, cushioned by the moss and his blanket, and watched him, transfixed. Singing, he was entirely with her and yet entirely away from her, so that she could really look at him, at his face, his shock of pale hair and the curve of his mouth, the elaborate design of birds embroidered into the sleeves and collar of his shirt, the fine spiraling patterns worked into his leather belt, his saber, lying parallel to his legs where he sat. In a more luxurious land he would have tended to plumpness, but this land had made him lean and tough, hardened with the riding. Yet his voice was sweet, as fragile as a budding flower. And when he finished, silence lay on him as naturally as song had.

"It's beautiful, Fedya," she said, a little in awe. "Thank you." She kissed him.

"Remember it. Remember this place."

Tess let her face slide in against his neck. His hair brushed her eyes. "He's chosen this place for the ambush," she said, because for four days no one, not even Yuri, had spoken a word to her about fighting.

He slipped his hand down to her back, holding her against him. "The plains are wide, but when men travel on a set path, they are very small, indeed." His fingers found her waist and explored it to the clasp of her belt.

"Too small to run?" His hair smelled of grass. "Too small to avoid-your pursuer?"

"Tess," he said. "There are better things to think of, this night, than war and death."

She woke with a start. Someone in her dream had been calling her name insistently, unable to reach her.

"Tess. Tess." The voice was wrong. That voice and her name did not belong together in waking life. Therefore, she was still asleep. But as she opened her eyes, she knew the voice for Bakhtiian's. She reached out her hand-

Fedya was gone.

"Tess."

Light infiltrated their bower. It had been dark when she had fallen asleep. Her clothes lay in a heap at her feet, so tangled that she had to pull them apart and set them in a neat row before she could put them on. Her hands shook. She tried to tuck in her shirt with one hand and comb her hair with the other, gave it up, and tucked her trousers into her boots instead. Crawling on her hands and knees to the entrance, pushing through leaves, untangling a vine from her hair, she stood up just outside. His back was to her.

"Ilya?" Morning sun shone brightly in her eyes. She had to squint, and still she could not make him out clearly. He turned. She saw, with a shock, the streak of blood down his face, and then, like a rush of sick trembling, she realized that it was not his blood at all but someone else's. "The blood," she gasped.