Margaret Weis - The reign of Istar

There were possibilities in her silence. At night, as I slept — Alyce wrapped in rough woolen blankets with a tall fire between us — those possibilities changed into dreams in which the minotaur and the kender had no roles to play.

But the kender was with us more often than not, and so we three were together — Alyce, Peverell, and me — when, at the end of our third day of travel, the sun set in a blaze of red and ahead of us Dinn spotted the nomad woman and her child.

My horse danced skittishly, sidled away from the minotaur's horns. Dinn smiled thinly when he saw that, tossed his head so that a horn came dangerously close to the horse's shoulder… and my leg. He pointed to the tall grass where it parted counter to the wind's direction.

"Two," he said to Alyce. "Long-braids."

The nomad woman ran swiftly, though she went hunched over, burdened by the weight of the small boy clinging to her back. The boy's head bounced limply in rhythm to her swift, ground-covering stride. His sunbrowned leg was streaked with blood. The woman's course would take her right across our path.

Answering the instinct of fifteen years, I reached for the coil of rope hanging from my saddle. One good cast and I'd have her and the child roped, down, and trussed.

Alyce, seeing my gesture, said, "How much for those two, Hunter-Doune?"

Eighty gold, I told her. Forty for each, the woman not being worth more than the child.

Alyce smiled coldly. "Your share of Kell's bounty is worth ten times that. Are you with me, Hunter-Doune?"

I didn't answer. I was watching the woman run. Although the wind covered our whispering and our mounts were still, something — a silence of birds, maybe — must have spoken to her instincts. She threw a swift look over her shoulder and stumbled, startled to see us. Her eyes were large and dark, like empty holes in a mask of terror. The sight chilled me, squeezed my heart so that it was as if I felt the desperate fear myself.

The woman recovered quickly, hitched the boy up higher on her back, and ran faster.

I took my hand away from the rope, saw Alyce watching me — not weighing anything, not taunting. Rather, she smiled the way you do when you first meet someone and you're thinking that you like what you see. Peverell looked from one to the other of us, then gestured something. His hands flew too fast for me to get his meaning, but Alyce did. A dark scowl replaced her smile as she told him to stop talking nonsense.

They say that the red moon, Lunitari, is the daughter of Gilean, the deity who is the keeper of all the knowledge possessed by the gods. Solinari, the silver moon, is Paladine's son, and he watches over all the magic being done in the world. That night, while the others rested, I walked the first watch and saw these two moons — gods' children, if you will — rising. First to rise was Lunitari. When I squinted eastward across the plains, I thought I saw the tall towers of Istar silhouetted against the red disk, dark like a jagged bite taken out of the moon's rim. Second up was Solinari, and he rose a little north of Istar, avoided the teeth of the Kingpriest's city.

Foolish fancy, eh? Well, I had a lot on my mind — too much for sleeping — and I kept coming back to the memory of how I'd felt when Alyce smiled after I'd let the nomads go.

That was just more foolish fancy. Why should I care how I weighed out in her eyes? Aye, she was long-legged and lovely. Her blue eyes, when they weren't mocking, spoke of possibilities, inspired dreams. She was round — and surely soft and warm — in all the right places, but so was many another woman, and I knew that well enough. The only difference between Alyce and them was that she was a good hand with a sword, good to talk to… and she was leading me to a quarter share of a fine, large bounty.

Sometimes she looked at me in such a way as to make me want to be what she seemed to hope I was.

Empty? Maybe once. Maybe still, but Alyce, when she looked at me with her eyes soft, a little hopeful, and gravely thoughtful, made me think that she might be able to fill some of those empty places in me.

I shook my head hard, as if I was trying to shake out this nonsense. It was nonsense, I told myself. Isn't one woman just as good as another on a cold night?

I was looking at the silver moon when I thought that, so I guess you could say I was praying for something, maybe for an answer, or a way to understand why it mattered to me what Alyce thought.

Of course, Solinari didn't have much to say about it. The children of gods have their own business to tend.

When the moons were past their heights I left my watch, stepped carefully around the sleeping minotaur, and sat beside Peverell at the campfire. He gave me a sideways look, then signed something to Alyce. When I asked her what he'd said, she didn't answer right away. I had the idea that she wasn't thinking about how to translate, but whether to. Finally she repeated his gestures, slowly, the way you enunciate each word for the hard of hearing. A long reaching up with both hands to cup something, an abrupt dragging down motion.

"Sun setting," I guessed.

"Right."

She raised four fingers, and I suggested that this, coupled with the first gesture, meant four days passing.

"Right again." Her blue eyes danced as she made the fists-and-clasp gesture I knew to mean friend. "You know that one. How about this?"

She repeated Peverell's last gesture: slammed her right fist hard onto her level left palm. Then she mimicked his expression: wide-eyed, drop-jawed surprise.

"What do you think that means, Hunter-Doune?"

"I have no idea."

She moved her lips in a secret little smile. "It's the whole point of what Pev said. I'll leave you to consider it."

I spent the night listening to the wind sigh down the starred sky, thinking long and hard about Peverell's gestures. Might be, I thought, that Peverell's fist-in-palm gesture meant an ambush. If so, perhaps he and Alyce were anticipating Kell's surprise to find himself at last taken. And that in only another four days. But nowhere in that interpretation did Peverell's friend-gesture fit.

Last, before I made ready to sleep, I remembered Alyce's secret smile.

Now I remembered this wasn't the first time I'd seen her smile like that. The first time was in the Hart's Leap, right after she'd hunted around trying to find an oath for me to swear. An oath that maybe I wouldn't have given if I'd known it was Dinn I had to help break out of jail.

Cold and creeping came suspicion.

Might be, I thought, that there's another way to interpret Peverell's gestures and Alyce's secret smile. Might be they were having a laugh over how surprised I'd be to find that the oath she took on her father's sword signified nothing but a means to an end — the minotaur's release from jail, the capture of the heretic Kell, and a third share of the bounty instead of a quarter.

Four days. Friendship. And a violent, smashing gesture. Surprise.

Alyce — her considering looks, her soft eyes, her surprised pleasure when I let the nomads go? What were those things? Bait, maybe. Four are better than three on the savannah — until the three got where they needed to go.

Time to get out. Time to cut my losses and get out.

I stayed — for the sake of the gold, I told myself. What I didn't admit — didn't even know then — was that I'd foolishly come too far down the road of fancy to turn back.

Alyce kept to herself after that night. Quiet and brooding, she spoke to Dinn only when she had to, and spoke to me hardly at all. She had something on her mind, and if she talked to anyone about it, that one was Peverell — who seemed to know about, and maybe even sympathize with, whatever troubled her.

They conversed in his silent, graceful language of gesture, and so I had no idea why she'd grown so suddenly distant.