He stayed among the graves long enough to start feeling the cold again, and to take a brooding interest in the slight but unmistakable paunch that was beginning to threaten the aesthetics of his narrow-hipped waist. No further corpsemites showed themselves. He took an uncontaminated shred of his jerkin as a rag and cleaned the body fluids off the Ravensfriend’s bluish surfaces with fastidious care. Archeth had insisted the Kiriath blade was proof against all and any corrosive substances, but she had been wrong about things before.
The final outcome of the war, to name but one.
Then, finally, Ringil remembered that the creatures had touched him and, as if on cue, the blisters they’d left began to burn. He rubbed at the one on his cheek until it burst, deriving a certain brutal amusement from the thin pain he got out of it. Not what you’d call a heroic wound, but it was all he’d have to show for the evening’s exertions. No one would be coming out here to check on the carnage until it got safely light.
Oh well, maybe you can narrate it into a couple of pints and a fowl platter. Maybe Bashka’ll buy you a replacement jerkin out of sheer gratitude, if he can afford it after he’s paid to rebury his mother. Maybe that towheaded lad from the stables will listen in and be impressed enough to overlook this gut you’re so intent on developing.
Yeah, and maybe your father’s written you back into his testament. Maybe the Yhelteth Emperor is a queer.
That last was worth a grin. Ringil Angeleyes, scarred hero of Gallows Gap, chuckled to himself a little in the chill of the graveyard, and glanced around at the silent markers as if his long-fallen comrades might share the joke. The quiet and the cold gave him nothing back. The dead stayed stonily unmoved, just the way they’d been now for nine years, and slowly Ringil’s smile faded away. A shiver clung at his back.
He shook it off.
Then he slung the Ravensfriend back across his shoulder and went in search of a clean shirt, some food, and a sympathetic audience.
CHAPTER 2
The sun lay dying amid torn cloud the color of bruises, at the bottom of a sky that never seemed to end. Night drew in across the grasslands from the east, turned the persistent breeze chilly as it came. There’s an ache to the evenings up here, Ringil had said once, shortly before he left. It feels like losing something every time the sun goes down.
Egar the Dragonbane, never very sure what his faggot friend was on about when he got into that kind of mood, still couldn’t make sense of the words now, best part of a decade on.
Couldn’t think why he’d remembered them right now, either.
He snorted, shifted idly in his saddle, and turned up the collar on his sheepskin coat. It was a reflexive thing; the breeze didn’t really bother him. He was long past feeling the cold on the steppes at this time of year—yeah, wait till winter really gets here and it’s time to grease up—but the mannered huddling gesture was part of a whole wardrobe of idiosyncrasies he’d brought home with him from Yhelteth and never bothered to unlearn. Just a hangover, just like the southern memories that stubbornly refused to fade, and the vague sense of detachment Lara had cited in council when she left him and went back to her family’s yurt.
Damn I miss you, wench.
He did his best to put some genuine melancholy behind the thought, but his heart wasn’t in it. He didn’t really miss her at all. In the last six or seven years he must have sired close on a dozen squalling bundles from the gates of Ishlinichan to the Voronak tundra outposts in the northeast, and at least half the mothers had as close a place in his affections as Lara. The marriage had just never worked at the same level as the initial roll-in-the-summer-grass passion it was based on. At the council hearing for the separation, truth be told, what he’d felt mostly was relief. He’d offered only token objection, and that more so Lara wouldn’t get more pissed off than she already was. He’d paid the settlement and he’d been plowing another Skaranak milkmaid within a week. They were practically throwing themselves at him, anyway, with the news that he was single again.
Still. A little short of decorous, that one.
He grimaced. Decorous wasn’t a word he used, wasn’t his fucking word at all, but there it was, embedded in his head along with everything else. Lara was right, he should never have made the vows. Probably never would have done but for those eyes as she lay in the dusk-lit grass and opened herself to him, the startling jade-edged pupils that stabbed him through with memories of Imrana and her muslin-hung bedchamber.
Yeah, those eyes, and those tits, my son. Tits she had on her, old Urann himself would have sold his soul for.
That was more like it. That was a thought for a Majak horseman’s head.
Fuck’s sake stop brooding, will you. Count your Sky-given blessings.
He scratched beneath his buffalo-hide cap with one hard-nailed finger and watched the twilit figures of Runi and Klarn as they prodded the herd back toward the encampment. Every buffalo he could see was his, not to mention the shares he held in the Ishlinak herds farther to the west. The red-and-gray clan pennants he and the other two flew at the necks of their staff lances bore his name in Majak script. He was known throughout the steppes; every encampment he went to, women fell at his feet with open legs. About the only thing he really missed these days were hot-water baths and a decent shave, neither of which the Majak had a lot of use for.
Couple of fucking decades ago, my son, you didn’t have much use for them, either. Remember that?
True enough. Twenty years ago, Egar’s outlook, near as he could recall, wasn’t much different from that of his clan fellows. Nothing wrong with cold water, a stoked communal sweat bath every few days, and a good beard. Not like these effete fucking southerners with their perfumed manners and woman-soft skins.
Yeah. But twenty years ago you were an ignorant fuck. Twenty years ago you didn’t know your dick from a sword hilt. Twenty fucking years ago—
Twenty fucking years ago, Egar was no different from the next wispy-chinned Majak buffalo herdboy. He’d seen nothing of the lands beyond the steppes, believed himself sophisticated because his elder brothers had taken him to Ishlin-ichan to lose his virginity, and could not have grown a beard to save his life. He believed implicitly in what his father and brothers told him, and what they told him was, basically, that the Majak were the roughest toughest drinkers and fighters on earth, that of all the Majak clans, the Skaranak were the hardiest, and that the northern grasslands were the only place any real man would even consider living.
It was a philosophy that Egar disproved for himself, at least in part, one night in a tavern in Ishlin-ichan a few years later. Attempting to drink away his father’s untimely death in a stampede, he got into a childish fight with a swarthy, serious-eyed imperial, a visiting Yhelteth merchant’s bodyguard, it later turned out. The fight was largely Egar’s fault, childish was the adjective applied to it—and him—by the imperial, who then went on to trounce him with an unfamiliar empty-hand fighting technique and without drawing his sword. Youth and anger and the anesthetic power of the drink kept Egar on his feet for a while, but he was up against a professional soldier for the first time in his life and the result was a foregone conclusion. The third time he got knocked to the floor, he stayed there.