Kate Elliott - Shadow Gate

'No, you won't. But I give my oath as an apprentice to the Lady, where I took my year's service, that I'm telling you the truth. It's her honor I hold in my hands when I tell you that if I can bring them down, I will.'

'You alone? That one seems to me a bit of a coward and an outlander besides, which might account for it.'

'I can't stand aside and do nothing.'

He was seated on a log, hands laid loose in his lap and arms slack, everything still too sore and abused to work properly. But he was stronger than he'd been when they'd cut him down.

'I know the back routes. I'll make my own way to Toskala.'

'We'll leave you provisions then, if you can carry them.'

He closed and opened his right hand, face scrunched up in pain, but he managed the movement, and then closed and opened his left hand to show it could be done.

'Tie the bag to my back, and help me shove this log into the river. They can't see me at night, and we're past the cataracts. It's smooth water more or less downstream.'

'A reasonable plan, if you can hang on.'

'I've hung on this long. I endured worse.' He rose. 'No point waiting. The council needs my report.'

She rigged the provision bag around his torso, then dragged the log into the river. 'You're sure?'

He flexed his shoulders, tested his range of motion. 'My thanks lo you for rescuing me. What's your name?'

The streaming current rushed, louder than the wind.

She smiled sadly. 'Ramit.'

He hooked himself into the fork where a branch had grown out from the bole. 'My thanks, Ramit. May the gods honor you.'

His words brought tears. 'May you find a safe haven, Miken.'

She shoved the log onto the river and watched until she could no longer see it on the dark waters. Then she walked back and sat by the fire, contemplating the lick and simmer of flames and the occasional spat spark. Was there a pattern to its burning, a truth in the way flames ran merry along a charring log or glowed in a blue-white shimmer where coals burned dense and hot?

If Guardians can be made, then they can be unmade.

If Lord Radas and his ally can kill, then so could she.

A branch snapped. She grabbed her sword.

Hari strolled into the light. 'So you didn't trust him either. Wise of you, my sweet.'

'When did I become your sweet?' She sheathed the sword.

He braced a foot on another drift log and stared at the sky, but it was overcast and thus starless. Ripples of firelight seemed to work through the fabric of his twilight cloak. Her own had a stubborn bone-white gleam, as pure as death.

'Two times I took off my cloak,' she said, 'and I couldn't breathe, and then it wrapped around me, and took me back, like it refused to let me die. So you can't just remove a cloak and kill them that way. You'd have to bind the cloak as well.'

'You can't kill what is already dead. Anyway, if a living person touches the clasp which binds a cloak, their skin burns and blisters just as if they were touching fire.'

'How do you know that?'

'Yordenas does it, if a person angers him. Makes them hold the clasp until the skin burns off their hands.'

Marit shuddered. 'Where is he now?'

'He was sent south to take charge of Argent Hall, and I was sent south with the army.'

'Then you both failed.'

'And I'm pleased to hear it!' His grin made her laugh. 'I did my best to do as little as possible with my command. I marched as a mercenary with the Qin for a while, and I saw how disciplined their

troops were, and how certain men could not bear the discipline. I was given the dregs, the criminals and the insane, I swear to you, and I let them give in to the worst that drove them. That's why they were so easy to defeat at Olossi.'

'Whose side are you really on? Had you ridden them harder, you'd have led them to victory.'

He bent to grab a stick, and poked into the fire until, with an oath, he flung the now-burning stick into the river. 'Let's ride. No use lingering here.'

She raised her arms, stretching. He watched her in silence, but she did not need the sense granted by her Guardian's cloak to recognize a stirring of arousal in his body.

'Harishil, eh? Hari being your short name. You're not Water-born?'

'I don't know what that means. Although my brothers complained that I was always too full of hot air.'

She smiled, not wanting to think of Fire-born Joss. 'Air, then. Which suits me. I can think of a reason to linger here, where it's quiet and isolated.'

He sucked in a breath, moving neither toward nor away.

'I don't like being alone, Hari. And whatever else you may be, you're an attractive man. Despite everything' — she leavened the phrase with a cocky grin- 'I like you.'

Her dear friend Kedi had often said, 'There's a reason it fits firmly in the hand, convenient for women to lead us around, for it's true that's what leads and we must follow.'

Hari spoke a phrase in a language she had never heard before. He ran a hand over his hair to his nape. She rose, because surely he was not budging, and tested him by stroking up from his nape. He kept his coarse black hair clipped so short it was like bristles. A reeve's cut.

'That tickles!' she said, laughing.

His breath grew harsh, but not from fear.

The first time she'd bedded Joss, she'd played coy, to encourage his reckless streak, but Hari was a different man, so guarded it seemed likely he'd lost the habit of trust. Forget subtlety.

One kiss was all it took. And if he was a little desperate, in the manner of a drowning man, she didn't mind: she too was a little

desperate, having swum in cold and lonely waters for far too long.

Marit and Hari rode at a leisurely pace south toward Toskala on the Istri Walk, in no hurry to reach the army although Marit knew they ought to move quickly.

'Eagles!' Hari squinted at specks in the sky.

'You seem pleased to see them.'

'I wonder if they see us.' He grinned. 'And what they make of us if they do.'

Nothing like sex to cheer up a man, reflected Marit. The edge was still there, but he chattered a lot more about nothing of importance. Good thing she liked his voice.

A wagon with a broken axle had been dragged to one side, its bed stripped bare. Vultures flapped heavenward from a pair of decomposed corpses sprawled at the edge of woods an arrow's shot off the road. If Hari had seen the bodies, he made no comment, but for a while they rode in silence. The road was wide and smooth, the powerful River Istri a noisy neighbor to their right. Normally in the rich heartland of Haldia a traveler would expect to meet steady traffic, but they encountered no one except for soldiers wearing the eight-pointed star who manned the occasional barricade.

Yet the land was green, and the sky today as much blue as cloud. It was a fine morning for a ride through handsome countryside. What were the eagles doing? What hall did they come from?

'I have to admit,' said Hari with a laugh, 'I wasn't sure I could manage it. It's a relief to know I still can.'

'Manage-? Aui! Is that all men think of? I ask you.' But it was true that, being dead, one might start to wonder. 'Surely you could have…'

He had a way of tightening one side of his face, pulled by shame-ful thoughts he wished to cut loose. 'That would be more than I could endure. Either to know her thoughts, and surely to find in them some thing I wished never to have known. Or to know I was forcing her and share every moment of dread and pain. I am not that sort of man. If you'd seen what Lord Radas had it in him to do, you'd feel as I do.'

The day seemed darker. 'You're right, of course. I'm sorry I made a jest of it, if it seemed I did.'

'It makes me wonder about these Guardians your tales sing of. What manner of folk were they?'

'They were the guardians of justice!' But she faltered. 'Surely the gods cannot have meant otherwise.'