LITMIR.BIZ

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death.

      “You have achieved your own destruction,” he said with astonishing arrogance to the man on the horse. “Do you know who your louts have killed here?” His voice was high-pitched for a man, almost shrill. “Do you know what will happen when I report this in Esteren?”

      The broad-shouldered, brown-haired man on the black horse said nothing. An older man beside him, extremely tall and lean, with greying hair, said sharply, “So sure you are going back, de Rada?”

      The stocky man didn’t even look at him. After a moment, though, the first horseman, the leader, said very quietly, “Answer him, Garcia. He asked you a question.” The name was used as one might admonish a child, but the voice was cold.

      For the first time Ziri saw a flicker of doubt appear in the face of the man named Garcia. Only for a moment, though. “You aren’t a complete fool, Belmonte. Don’t play games with me.”

      “Games?” A hard, swift anger in the mounted man’s voice. He swept one hand in a slashing arc, indicating all of Orvilla, burning freely now. Nothing would be saved. Nothing at all. Ziri began looking around for his father. A feeling of dread was overtaking him.

      “Would I play a game in the midst of this?” the man on the black horse snapped. “Be careful, Garcia. Do not insult me. Not tonight. I told your brother what would happen if you came near Fezana. I assume he told you. I must assume he told you.”

      The man on the ground was silent.

      “Does it matter?” said the grey-haired one. He spat on the ground. “This one is offal. He is less than that.”

      “I will remember you,” said the black-haired man sharply, turning now to the speaker. He clenched his fists. “I have a good memory.”

      “But you forgot your brother’s warning?” It was the leader once more, the one called Belmonte. His voice was calm again, dangerously so. “Or you chose to forget it, shall we say? Garcia de Rada, what you did as a boy on your family estates was no concern of mine. What you do here, as someone who passes for a man, unfortunately is. This village lies under the protection of the king of Valledo whose officer I am. The parias I am here to collect was paid in part by the people you have butchered tonight. You have taken the promises of King Ramiro and made him a liar in the eyes of the world.” He paused, to let the words sink in. “Given that fact, what should I do with you?”

      It was evidently not a question the man addressed had been expecting. But he was not slow of wit. “Given that fact,” he mocked, imitating the tone. “You ought to have been a lawyer not a soldier, Belmonte. A judge in your eastern pastures, making rulings about stolen sheep. What is this, your courthouse?”

      “Yes,” said the other man. “Now you begin to understand. That is exactly what it is. We await your reply. What should I do with you? Shall I give you to these people to be spread-eagled? The Asharites nail people to wood as well. We learned it from them. Did you know that? I doubt we’d have trouble finding carpenters.”

      “Don’t bluster,” said Garcia de Rada.

      Jehane, walking back towards the knot of men in the midst of the burning village, with a little girl’s hand in each of hers and a black rage in her heart, saw only the blurred motion of Rodrigo Belmonte’s right arm. She heard a crack, like a whip, and a man cried out.

      Then she realized it had been a whip, and saw the black line of blood on Garcia de Rada’s cheek. He would be scarred for life by that, she knew. She also knew she wanted his life to end tonight. The fury in her was as nothing she had ever felt before; it was huge, terrifying. She felt she could kill the man herself. It was necessary to breathe deeply, to try to preserve a measure of self-control.

      When her father had been marred in Cartada it had come to Jehane and her mother as rumor first and then report, and then they had lived with the knowledge for two days before they were allowed to see what had been done and take him away. What she had just seen in the one-room hut by the river was raw as salt in an open sore. Jehane had wanted to scream. What was medicine, what was all her training, her oath, in the face of an atrocity such as this?

      Anger made her reckless. Leading the two children, she walked straight in to stand between Rodrigo Belmonte and the leader of the Jaddite raiders, the man he’d called Garcia and had just scarred with a whip.

      “Which one was it?” she said to the children. She pitched her voice to carry.

      There was abruptly a silence around them. A young man, fourteen, fifteen perhaps, began hurrying towards her. The two girls had said there might be an older brother still alive. The mother’s sister, Abirab, who used to request endless salves and infusions of Jehane at the market for foot pains or monthly cramps or sleeplessness, was still in the hut trying to do something impossible—to smooth the horror of a dead, viciously mutilated woman and the stillborn child that had spilled from her.

      The young man rushed up to them and knelt beside his sisters. One of them collapsed, weeping, against his shoulder. The other, the older, stood very straight, her face grave and intent, looking around at the raiders. “He wore a red shirt,” she said quite clearly, “and red boots.”

      “There, then,” said the man called Laín Nunez after a moment, pointing. “Bring him forward, Alvar.”

      A younger member of the band, the one with the oddly high stirrups on his horse, leaped from his mount. From the ranks of the surviving raiders he pushed someone into the open space. Jehane was still too consumed by her rage to give more than a brief thought to how they had all stopped what they’d been doing, for her.

      It wasn’t for her. She looked down at the boy kneeling with his weeping sister in his arms. “Your name is Ziri?”

      He nodded, looking up at her. His dark eyes were enormous in a white face.

      “I am sorry to have to tell you your mother and father are dead. There is no easy way to say it tonight.”

      “A great many people are dead here, doctor. Why are you interrupting?” It was Belmonte, behind her, and it was a fair question, in its way.

      But Jehane’s anger would not let her go. This man was a Jaddite, and the Jaddites had done this thing. “You want me to say it in front of the children?” She did not even look back at him.

      “No one here is a child after tonight.”

      Which was true, she realized. And so Jehane pointed to the man in the red shirt and said, though later she would wish she had not, “This man raped the mother of these children, near to term with another child. Then he put his sword inside her, up inside her, and ripped it out, and left her to bleed to death. When I arrived the child had already spilled out of the wound. Its head had been almost severed. By the sword. Before it was born.” She felt sick, speaking the words.

      “I see.” There was a weariness in Rodrigo Belmonte’s voice that caused her to turn back and look up at him. She could read nothing in his features.

      He sat his horse for a moment in silence, then said, “Give the boy your sword, Alvar. This we will not accept. Not in a village Valledans are bound to defend.”

      Where would you accept it? Jehane wanted to demand, but kept silent. She was suddenly afraid.

      “This man is my cousin,” the man called Garcia de Rada said sharply, holding a piece of grimy cloth to his bleeding face. “He is Parazor de Rada. The constable’s cousin, Belmonte. Remember who—”

      “Keep silent or I will kill you!”

      For the first time Rodrigo Belmonte raised his voice, and Garcia de Rada was not the only man to flinch before what he heard there. Jehane looked again into the face of the man they called the Captain, and then she looked away. Her fury seemed to have passed, leaving only grief and waves of sickness.

      The young soldier, Alvar, came obediently up to the boy who was still kneeling beside her, holding both his sisters now. Alvar offered his sword, hilt foremost. The boy, Ziri, looked past Jehane at Rodrigo Belmonte on his black horse

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