LITMIR.BIZ

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stood up and slowly he took the sword. The man called Alvar was as ashen-faced as Ziri, Jehane saw—and guessed that tonight would have been his own first taste of battle. There was blood on the blade.

      “Think what you are doing, Belmonte!” the man in the red shirt and boots suddenly cried hoarsely. “These things happen in war, on a raid. Do not pretend that your own men—”

      “War?” Rodrigo’s voice knifed in savagely. “What war? Who is at war? Who ordered a raid? Tell me!”

      The other man was still a long moment. “My cousin Garcia,” he finally said.

      “His rank at court? His authority? His reason?”

      No answer. The crackle and crash of the fires was all around them. The light was lurid, unholy, dimming the stars and even the moons. Jehane heard weeping now, the keening sounds of grief, from shadows at the edges of the flames.

      “May Jad forgive you and find a place for your soul in his light,” said Rodrigo Belmonte, looking at the red-shirted man, speaking in a very different voice.

      Ziri looked up at him one last time, hearing that, and evidently saw what he needed to see. He turned and stepped forward, with the unfamiliar blade.

      He will never have held a sword in his life, Jehane thought. She wanted to close her eyes, but something would not let her do that. The red-shirted man did not turn or try to flee. She thought it was courage, at the time, but later decided he might have been too astonished by what was happening to react. This simply did not happen to noblemen playing their games in the countryside.

      Ziri ibn Aram took two steady steps forward and then thrust the borrowed blade—awkwardly, but with determination—straight through the heart of the man who had killed his mother and his father. The man screamed as the blade went in, a terrible sound.

      Too late, Jehane remembered the two girls. She ought to have turned their faces away, covered their ears. Both had been watching. Neither was crying now. She knelt and gathered them to her.

      I caused this death, she was thinking. With rage no longer driving her, it was an appalling thought. She was abruptly mindful of the fact that she was out here beyond the walls of Fezana with the purpose of causing another.

      “I will take them now, doctor.”

      She looked up and saw the boy, Ziri, standing beside her. He had given the sword back to Alvar. There was a bleakness in his eyes. She wondered if, later, it would help him at all to have taken his revenge. She had to wonder that.

      She released the two girls and watched their brother lead them away from the open space. She didn’t know where they were going amid all the fires. She doubted he did either. She remained kneeling on the ground, looking at Garcia de Rada.

      “My cousin was a pig,” he said calmly, turning from the dead man to look up at Rodrigo Belmonte. “What he did was disgusting. We are well rid of him, and I will say as much when we all return home.”

      There was a bark of disbelieving laughter from Laín Nunez. Jehane could hardly believe the words, herself. Somewhere inside she was forced to acknowledge that the man had courage of a sort. He was a monster, though. A monster from the tales used by mothers to frighten their children into obedience. But here in Orvilla the monster had come, after all, and children had died. One had been stabbed by a sword before entering the world.

      She looked over her shoulder again, and saw Rodrigo Belmonte smiling strangely as he looked down at de Rada. No one in the world could have taken any comfort in that expression.

      “Do you know,” he said, his voice quiet again, almost conversational, “I have always thought you poisoned King Raimundo.”

      Jehane saw a startled apprehension in the craggy face of Laín Nunez. He turned sharply to Rodrigo. This, clearly, had not been expected. He moved his horse nearer to the Captain’s. Without turning to him, Rodrigo lifted a hand and Laín Nunez stopped. Turning back the other way, Jehane saw Garcia de Rada open his mouth and then close it again. He was clearly thinking hard, but she could see no fear in the man, not even now. Blood was dripping from the wound on his face.

      “You would not dare say such a thing in Esteren,” he said at length.

      His own voice was softer now. A new thread of tension seemed to be running through all the Jaddites. The last king of Valledo had been named Raimundo, Jehane knew that. The oldest of the three brothers, the sons of Sancho the Fat. There had been rumors surrounding Raimundo’s death, a story involving Rodrigo Belmonte, something about the present king of Valledo’s coronation. Ammar ibn Khairan could have told her, Jehane suddenly thought, and shook her head. Not a useful line of thinking.

      “Perhaps I might not,” Rodrigo said, still mildly. “We aren’t in Esteren.”

      “So you feel free to slander anyone you choose?”

      “Not anyone. Only you. Challenge me.” He still had that strange smile on his face.

      “Back home I will. Believe it.”

      “I do not. Fight me now, or admit you killed your king.”

      Out of the corner of her eye Jehane saw Laín Nunez make a curiously helpless gesture beside Rodrigo. The Captain ignored him. Something had altered in his manner and Jehane, for the first time, found herself intimidated by him. This issue—the death of King Raimundo—seemed to be his own open wound. She realized that Velaz had come up quietly to stand protectively beside her.

      “I will do neither. Not here. But say this again at court and observe what I do, Belmonte.”

      “Rodrigo!” Jehane heard Laín Nunez rasp. “Stop this, in Jad’s name! Kill him if you like, but stop this now.”

      “But that is the problem,” said the Captain of Valledo in the same taut voice. “I don’t think I can.”

      Jehane, struggling for understanding amid the rawness of her own emotions, wasn’t sure if he meant that he couldn’t kill, or he couldn’t stop what he was saying. She had a flashing sense that he probably meant both.

      With a roar, another of the houses collapsed. The fire had spread as far as it could. There was no more wood to ignite. Orvilla would be cinder and ash by morning, when the survivors would have to attend to the dead and the process of living past this night.

      “Take your men and go,” Rodrigo Belmonte said to the man who had done this thing.

      “Return our horses and weapons and we ride north on the instant,” said Garcia de Rada promptly.

      Jehane looked back and saw that Rodrigo’s cold smile was gone. He seemed tired now, drained of some vital force by this last exchange. “You sued for ransom,” he said. “Remember? There are witnesses. Full price will be settled at court by the heralds. Your mounts and weapons are a first payment. You are released on your sworn oaths to pay.”

      “You want us to walk back to Valledo?”

      “I want you dead,” said Rodrigo succinctly. “I will not murder a countryman, though. Be grateful and start walking. There are five hundred new Muwardi mercenaries in Fezana tonight, by the way. They’ll have seen these fires. You might not want to linger.”

      He was going to let them go. Privileges of rank and power. The way the world was run. Dead and mutilated farmers could be redeemed by horses and gold for the rescuers. Jehane had a sudden image—intense and disorienting—of herself rising smoothly from the brown, parched grass, striding over to that young soldier, Alvar, and seizing his sword. She could almost feel the weight of the weapon in her hands. With eerie clarity she watched herself walk up to Garcia de Rada—he had even turned partially away from her. In the vision she heard Velaz cry “Jehane!” just as she killed de Rada with a two-handed swing of the Jaddite sword. The soldier’s blade entered between two ribs; she heard the dark-haired man cry out and saw his blood spurt and continue to spill as he fell.

      She would never have thought such images could occur to her, let alone feel so urgent, so necessary. She was a

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