The Barbed Rose

It had been months and months since any of them had felt that seductive brush of magic across their souls. He missed it. He wondered whether they would ever get it back. Kallista said they would, but when?

Stone was moving, doing something where he knelt, but Fox couldn’t tell what it was. “Learning to dance on your knees like the horse tribes?” he asked.

“Digging a path out of this hole you’ve buried us in.” Stone’s voice sounded sharp, on edge. The women didn’t seem to notice, but Fox had been partnered with Stone for almost twenty years. Since they’d entered Warrior Caste training at six. He knew the man’s nuances.

Carefully, Fox rose to his feet and walked toward the cave entrance where he sat down with his back to the drifted snow. “What’s wrong?”

“You’re going to be sitting in snowmelt in another five ticks if you don’t move.”

Fox shifted a pace away and waited, wishing this knowing of his let him know more than mere presence or motion. He wanted to see Stone’s face, his expression. “Well?” he finally had to prompt.

“We’re running low on supplies.” Stone kept his voice quiet as he continued digging. “There’s enough for the adults for about a week yet, but milk for the babies—they’re too young to be able to eat our food, Merinda says, even were it chewed for them. They could do it for a bit, in an emergency, but not for long.”

Fox’s arms tightened around the little bodies snuggled in against his chest. “We have to find more. A cow. Something.”

“How, if the snow doesn’t stop?”

“We’ll find a way. I will not let our children die.” The fervor in his own voice surprised Fox.

Children had little value in Tibre, until the males joined their castes at six. Women had no caste save the one that they served, so girl children were worth even less. In Tibre, children belonged to the caste, to no one. These tiny girls were his. His and the rest of the ilian’s. That made all the difference in the world.

A gust of icy wind announced that Stone had broken through the layered snow. “Still snowing,” he said.

“How thick is the snow cover?”

“Maybe two paces. Not bad.” Stone moved a short distance away, then returned and laid something over the fresh opening that blocked the wind a bit. Fox touched it; a saddle blanket. Stone laid another atop the first.

Fox was about to rise and head back nearer the fire when Stone sat on the cold cave floor beside him. Apparently in the snowmelt he’d warned Fox against, for he swore and moved to Fox’s other side.

“So, is Merinda ilias? Like the rest of us?” Stone asked in a voice quieter than any Fox had heard from him.

“I—” The question tumbled Fox’s thoughts into a stinking pile. “What do you think?” Maybe if he played for time he could dredge an answer from his memory.

“I don’t know. You were there when it happened, right before we left. You heard what Kallista said when she gave her the bracelet.”

“Ilian together,” Fox quoted. “But that’s not what she said—what any of us said—the night you all married me. Was it the same before?”

As one of the original four in their ilian, Stone had been through the ceremony three times, once when the ilian was formed, once when Obed joined them and once for Fox. “Those were all the same. Not like with her. So I’m asking. Is it just to help look after Lorynda and Rozite, or is it—?”

“You want to have sex with her?”

“Khralsh.” Stone swore by the warrior face of the One they all worshipped. “It’s the other way round. You can’t see the way she’s always touching me, or the looks she gives me. She says we’re ilian now, that I don’t have to be—uncomfortable, she said. You know how long it’s been, what with Kallista so soon after her time and Aisse so near hers and the magic gone besides. It wouldn’t be a problem, except Merinda’s always…there.”

“And you never were one to turn down sex.” Fox grinned. “I wish I could see it. Stone Varyl, vo’Tsekrish, evading a woman’s advances like some—some girl before her rites.”

Stone clouted him openhanded on the back of his head, gently, because of the babies. Otherwise he’d have dealt him a blow hard enough to lay him flat. All in fun, of course. “You’re just jealous she’s not chasing you.”

“Damaged goods.” Fox couldn’t blame her. What woman wanted a man cursed with blindness?

Stone snorted in derision. “I think she’s more afraid Aisse would have her head if she tried.”

“Aisse?” He went still, as one of the babies twitched in her sleep then settled again. “Not that she couldn’t do it, but why would she want to?”

“Beside the fact you sired the child in her belly? She favors you. Over all of us.”

Fox choked off his laugh. “Small favor. Just because she will consent on rare occasions to actually speak to me as well as point and order.”

“See? Favor. So what do I do about Merinda? Is she ilias?”

Fox sighed. “I don’t know, and there’s no one to ask who does, with all of us here born Tibran.”

“Except Merinda.” Stone’s sigh was a longer echo of Fox’s. “I won’t betray my ilian.”

“No.” His brodir’s loyalty was never in doubt. Once given, it remained. Fox took another deep breath. “Ilian together, Kallista said.”

“And Torchay.”

“So.” Fox moved a tiny hand that was digging tiny furrows in his skin with tiny fingernails. “All we can do is assume that means what it says. We are ilian together, in all ways. If you want what she offers, take it.”

Stone remained where he sat. “I wish Kallista were here.”

“So do I. But since she’s not, we can only muddle through as best we can.” He froze. “There’s something outside.”

Stone scrambled for weapons as Fox stretched his peculiar sense in a desperate attempt to discover what it was. Rozite squalled when Merinda plucked her from inside Fox’s shirt but quieted once she was placed against Aisse’s warmth.

“Not human,” Fox said, relinquishing Lorynda to the healer. “Large. A deer, perhaps. We hunt.”

“In the storm?” Stone asked as he handed Fox a quiver of arrows and a spear.

“I can find our way back,” he said with a confidence he did not quite possess. “The babies might not like the blood, but it will feed them, will it not?”

Stone merely moved aside the blankets from the entrance and ducked through it.

CHAPTER TWO

The new path General Uskenda took led Kallista and her men around the bulk of the palace, along the broad surrounding avenues where trees planted decades ago for beauty were being cut down to recreate the defensive space. On the downhill side east of the palace, they passed through an iron gate in a high wall. Kallista felt the tingle of barrier magic as they crossed into a quiet garden where invalids wrapped in thick dressing gowns basked in the pale spring sunlight while they sat on scattered benches. Beyond the garden rose a tall sprawling building, Arikon’s main healing center.

Uskenda led them inside and cut sharply right, taking them up a wide stairway to the third floor. She strode down the long corridor that turned left, then right again before she rapped on a door and entered.

A man with bandages wrapping every visible part of him—head, arms, torso—struggled to rise from the bed where he lay.

“No, no, Sergeant. Don’t get up.” Uskenda motioned him back, and he subsided to a seated position, adjusting the blanket over the smallclothes that were apparently his only garment.

“How is she?”

“The same. They’re keeping her under for fear of what might happen when she knows—” The injured man broke off, voice thick with emotion.

Kallista knew him, knew his face, his voice, but she couldn’t place who he was.