Mercedes Lackey: Oathbound

"My she'enedra. But she is outClan, and strange to me, for all that the Goddess blessed our oathbinding with Her own fire. I know her but little. I -- only -- "

"What, bright blade?"

"I wish -- I wish to go home -- " The longing she felt rose in her throat and made it hard to speak.

"And so? What is there to hinder you?"

"There is," she replied, willing her eyes to stop stinging, "the matter of money. Ours is nearly gone. It is a long way to the Plains."

"So? Are you not now of the mercenary calling?"

"Well, unless there be some need for blades hereabouts -- the which I have seen no evidence for, the only way to reprovision ourselves will be if my she'enedra can turn her skill in magic to an honorable profit. For though I have masters of the best," she bowed her head in the little nod of homage a Shin'a'in gave to a respected elder, "sent by the Star-Eyed herself, what measure of attainment I have acquired matters not if there is no market for it."

"Hai'she'li! You should market that silver tongue, jel'enedra!" he laughed. "Well, and well. Three things I have come to tell you, which is why I arrive out-of-time and not at moonrise. First, that there will be storm tonight, and you should all shelter, mounts and riders together. Second, that because of the storm, we shall not teach you this night, though you may expect our coming from this day on, every night that you are not within walls."

He turned as if to leave, and she called out, "And third?"

"Third?" he replied, looking back at her over his shoulder. "Third -- is that everyone has a past. Ere you brood over your own, consider another's."

Before she had a chance to respond, he vanished, melting into the wind.

Wrinkling her nose over that last, cryptic remark, she went to find her she'enedra and partner.

Kethry was hovering over a tiny, nearly smokeless fire, skinning a pair of rabbits. Tarma almost smiled at the frown of concentration she wore; she was going at the task as if she were being rated on the results! They were a study in contrasts, she and her outClan blood-sister. Kethry was sweetfaced and curvaceous, with masses of curling amber hair and startling green eyes; she would have looked far more at home in someone's court circle as a pampered palace mage than she did here, at their primitive hearth. Or even more to the point, she would not have looked out of place as someone's spoiled, indulged wife or concubine; she really looked nothing at all like any mage Tarma had ever seen. Tarma, on the other hand, with her hawklike face, forbidding ice-blue eyes and nearly sexless body, was hardly the sort of person one would expect a mage or woman like Kethry to choose as a partner, much less as a friend. As a hireling, perhaps -- in which case it should have been Tarma skinning the rabbits, for she looked to have been specifically designed to endure hardship.

Oddly enough, it was Kethry who had taken to this trip as if she were the born nomad, and Tarma who was the one suffering the most from their circumstances, although that was mainly due to the unfamiliar weather.

Well, if she had not foreseen that becoming Kal'enedral meant suddenly acquiring a bevy of long-dead instructors, this partnership had come as even more of a surprise. The more so as Tarma had really not expected to survive the initial confrontation with those who had destroyed her Clan.

"Do not reject aid unlooked-for," her instructor had said the night before she set foot in the bandit's town. And unlooked-for aid had materialized, in the form of this unlikely sorceress. Kethry, too, had her interests in seeing the murderers brought low, so they had teamed together for the purpose of doing just that. Together they had accomplished what neither could have done alone -- they had utterly destroyed the brigands to the last man.

And so Tarma had lost her purpose. Now -- now there was only the driving need to get back to the Plains; to return before the Tale'sedrin were deemed a dead Clan. Farther than that she could not, would not think or plan.

Kethry must have sensed Tarma's brooding eyes on her, for she looked up and beckoned with her skinning knife.

"Fairly good hunting," Tarma hunched as close the fire as she could, wishing they dared build something larger.

"Yes and no. I had to use magic to attract them, poor things." Kethry shook her head regretfully as she bundled the offal in the skins and buried the remains in the snow to freeze hard. Once frozen, she'd dispose of them away from the camp, to avoid attracting scavengers. "I felt so guilty, but what else was I to do? We ate the last of the bread yesterday, and I didn't want to chance on the hunting luck of just one of us."

"You do what you have to, Keth. Well, we're able to live off the land, but Kessira and Rodi can't," Tarma replied. "Our grain is almost gone, and we've still a long way to go to get to the Plains. Keth, we need money."

"I know."

"And you're the one of us best suited to earning it. This land is too peaceful for the likes of me to find a job -- except for something involving at least a one-year contract, and that's something we can't afford to take the time for. I need to get back to the Plains as soon as I can if I'm to raise Tale'sedrin's banner again."

"I know that, too." Kethry's eyes had become shadowed, the lines around her mouth showed strain. "And I know that the only city close enough to serve us is Mornedealth."

And there was no doubt in Tarma's mind that Kethry would rather have died than set foot in that city, though she hadn't the vaguest notion why. Well, this didn't look to be the proper moment to ask --

"Storm coming; a bad one," she said, changing the subject. "I'll let the hooved ones forage for as long as I dare, but by sunset I'll have to bring them into camp. Our best bet is going to be to shelter all together because I don't think a fire is going to survive the blow."

"I wish I knew where you get your information," Kethry replied, frown smoothing into a wry halfsmile. "You certainly have me beat at weatherwitching."

"Call it Shin'a'in intuition," Tarma shrugged, wishing she knew whether it was permitted to an outland she'enedra -- who was a magician to boot -- to know of the veiled ones. Would they object? Tarma had no notion, and wasn't prepared to risk it. "Think you can get our dinner cooked before the storm gets here?"

"I may be able to do better than that, if I can remember the spells." The mage disjointed the rabbits, and spitted the carcasses on twigs over the fire. She stripped off her leather gloves, flexed her bare fingers, then held her hands over the tiny fire and began whispering under her breath. Her eyes were half-slitted with concentration and there was a faint line between her eyebrows. As Tarma watched, fascinated, the fire and their dinner were enclosed in a transparent shell of glowing gold mist.

"Very pretty; what's it good for?" Tarma asked when she took her hands away.

"Well, for one thing, I've cut off the wind; for another, the shield is concentrating the heat and the meat will cook faster now."

"And what's it costing you?" Tarma had been in Kethry's company long enough now to know that magic always had a price. And in Kethry's case, that price was usually taken out of the resources of the spell-caster.

Kethry smiled at her accusing tone. "Nowhere near so much as you might think; this clearing has been used for overnighting a great deal, and a good many of those camping here have celebrated in one way or another. There's lots of residual energy here, energy only another mage could tap. Mages don't take the Trade Road often, they take the Courier's Road when they have to travel at all."

"So?"

"So there's more than enough energy here not only to cook dinner but to give us a little more protection from the weather than our bit of canvas."