"Yes, Papa," said Dove meekly.

"Yes, Papa," echoed Sarai.

Aly glanced at Ochobu. The old mage watched the duke, her eyes and face unreadable. Still, thought Aly, she isn't cursing or spitting on the floor because he and the d.u.c.h.ess are luarin. It's a start.

In a time of fear, the One Who I Promised will come to the raka, bearing glory in her train and justice in her hand. She will restore the G.o.d to his proper temple and his children to her right hand. She will be twice royal, wise and beloved, a living emblem of truth to her people. She will be attended by a wise one, the cunning one, the strong one, the warrior, and the crows. She will give a home to all, and the kudarung will fly in her honor.

-From the Kyprish Prophecy, written in the year 200H.E., discovered in Duke Mequen's books by Aly

13.

LADIES OF THE RAKA.

The next morning, after Pembery and Aly helped them to dress and make up their room, Sarai and Dove took Aly to breakfast, then to the stable. They pa.s.sed Nawat, seated in the sun as was his habit, carefully gluing feathers to shafts.

Aly stopped for a moment, fascinated with Nawat's fine touch as he set the fletchings in glue. Sarai returned and dragged her away.

Lokeij's stable boys had already saddled Sarai's gelding, Dove's mare, and Aly's mare Cinnamon. Fesgao, two of the other men-at-arms, and Junai were already mounted, waiting for them. Aly clambered as awkwardly as she could into the saddle and made a small business of wriggling to settle herself. Their party rode through Tanair at a walk. Many of the people who were out wanted to greet the two Balitang girls personally. Aly was careful to sit her mount like a sack of flour, keeping up the pretense that she rode badly.

Once they were clear of Tanair's gate, Sarai cried, "Let's go!" and kicked her gelding into a gallop. Fesgao and one of the men-at-arms followed her, catching up before she was too far ahead. Dove did not even twitch her mare's rein for a faster gait. Aly, Junai, and the other man-at-arms stayed with her.

"I thought she just did that to show off for Bronau," Aly commented.

"No," Dove told her, and sighed heavily. "Every summer, when we go to our mountain estates on Tongkang, she gallops everywhere. She loves to ride. I think she'd do anything in the saddle if she could, including sleep."

"That talent could be useful," Aly pointed out.

"Wait till your behind starts to hurt,then tell me if it's useful," advised the younger girl. "I really admire Winna. All those rides with Bronau, and never once did she let on she's got saddle sores."

"She wants Sarai to like herthat much?" Aly was surprised. She knew that the d.u.c.h.ess wanted her stepdaughters' affection, but she hadn't guessed how far the lady might go for it.

"Well, a little," Dove admitted. "They get on well enough anymore. Mostly Winna came for Bronau." She frowned, her small dark face intent on her thoughts.

"Winna likes him well enough. I mean, you could tell, she laughed at his jokes, and they talked all the time, but-Aly, she doesn't trust him. I don't think she even knows how little she trusts him. She never let them escape their bodyguards on our rides."

"Interesting," Aly said thoughtfully, sharpening her magical Sight so that she could keep an eye on Sarai and her escorts, still galloping down the road. "She doesn't think he'd dishonor Sarai, does she?"

"I don't know," Dove replied. "What I know is that Winna understands the prince as well as anybody, even better than Papa. Her not trusting him to behave honorably, that worries me. Doesn't it worry you? Because I don't think we've seen the last of His Highness, not at all."

Aly looked at the twelve-year-old. "You're very observant," she remarked.

"And cold," Dove said, her mouth pulled down in distaste. "You didn't say cold.

Everyone does."

"But you're not cold," Aly replied. "You've learned to hide yourself. To hide in plain sight."

"Like you," Dove pointed out.

Aly grinned. "You have to admit, it's very useful."

Dove chuckled. When she did, her face lit with a powerful light. "Do you play chess?"

"A little," replied Aly, who could almost beat her grandfather, one of the finest players in Tortall.

"Good," Dove said cheerfully. "It's getting harder to lose so Papa doesn't realize what I'm doing. I can tell him I'm teaching you."

After their return to the castle, Aly laid out clean clothes for Dove, then went in search of their new mage. She found Ochobu in the rooms set aside for the healer and any patients at the back of the kitchen wing. The old woman was hanging up bunches of dry herbs next to those Rihani had already prepared.

Shelves along one side of the infirmary, once empty but for Rihani's collection of salves, liquids, and tools, now bore a collection of medical and magical tools, substances, and books.

"What do you want?" Ochobu demanded, stretching to hang a bunch of dried mint from a beam overhead.

Aly leaned against the door frame and smiled. "I wanted to see how you were settling in. I confess, I thought you'd prefer to live in a hut behind the stable than here within luarin walls."

Ochobu glared at her. "If I say I will do a thing, I do it," she informed Aly stiffly. "I have come to safeguard the lady Sarai, and to help you win your wager. If the Balitang children survive the summer, there will be one less luarin in the Isles at least, and you are a particularly annoying one."

Aly raised her brows. "So the G.o.d told you of our bet. Does Ulasim know?"

Ochobu shook her head. "The G.o.d spoke to me in the night. He says you are only a temporary irritation. He thinks that with the summer over, the luarin rulers will have sorted out the kingship. The lady who may or may not be our promised one shall be safe for the winter." She poured juniper berries from a bowl into a mortar and began to mash them, releasing their piney scent.

The mention of the end of the wager itched Aly. Being called "a temporary irritation" was also quite annoying. "There are too many of us to kill, you know," she pointed out, thinking she was starting to talk like her father. "Too many who have been here three centuries."

"Do you think I don't know that?" demanded Ochobu, pausing in her work to scowl at Aly. "I'll have to get used to luarin, even if they aren't you."

"You will if you don't want a ma.s.sacre," Aly said, holding the old woman's eyes with hers. "If you don't want to mark your return to power with killing. How much luarin blood will you discard? Half-bloods? You'd murder your own lady, then. She'd object to the murder of her luarin father and stepmother in any case. Quarter-bloods, eighth-bloods? How much do you count as being too much?"

"Stop it," growled the old woman. "The raka people are not like the first three Rittevon kings, slaughtering those who would not bend the knee to them. We are not murderers."

"That's not what I learned at my da's knee," Aly retorted. Her mental image of people executed by righteous natives was too awful for her to let Ochobu's prejudices stand without argument. "The raka used to kill all the time. Your n.o.bles and your rather temporary queens in the years before the luarin came were so busy battling each other that you didn't have the strength to fight off an invasion. By the time you banded together, it was too late."

"Iknow that," Ochobu growled, mashing her berries with ferocity. "Allof us who inherited this mess know."

"Is a mess what you mean to give your new queen?" Aly wanted to know. "How can she be sure her people will stand behind her? Or will you put a dagger in her back for the crime of not choosing a father the raka will approve?" Aly inspected her fingernails. They would need work if she was to continue as a maid rather than a goatherd. "Personally, I think you might do well with Sarai on the throne-"

"Silence!" Ochobu interrupted, glaring at Aly. "No names!"

Aly raised an eyebrow at her and waited.

Ochobu laid her pestle aside. "We have lived too long as tenants on lands that our foremothers owned. I know that. I know what is at stake. I can see for myself that a certain young woman is royal in two bloodlines, and that seems to fit the prophecy. But I am no lapdog, trained to roll onto my back for you or any other luarin. I am here to make up my own mind."

Aly brushed a speck from her sleeve. "Then let me tell you something I've observed. Those you call luarin here, including the ones who are part luarin, part raka-they aren't citizens of the Eastern or Southern Lands. They see themselves as Kyprians. They took your land's names for their own. They've made the Isles prosper. I think they've earned the right to stay, if they don't side with the Rittevons when the time comes."

"Is that the G.o.d speaking through you?" Ochobu demanded, her eyes flinty. "Or just you?"

Aly fought the urge to give Nawat's wing shrug for a reply. "I a.s.sume the G.o.d picked me for my opinions as well as my skills, however temporary I might be. I am an outsider. Sometimes we see more clearly than those who live inside the problem."

"I'll be better off when you leave," Ochobu complained. For the moment she sagged, the lines of her face deepening. "You've given me a headache. Go away."

Aly went.

She took lunch with the Balitang women and spent the afternoon with Sarai and Dove as they played with Elsren and Petranne. After Winnamine summoned the two older girls to their newly begun weapons training, Aly occupied herself with household mending and a quick search of Sergeant Veron's rooms, to read his latest reports to the Crown. Once she had finished, she asked Chenaol to heat water for the sisters' baths, then laid out the girls' supper dresses. Bored with nothing to do but mend clothes, Aly wandered over to the window to look out over the inner courtyard.

Below her Dove and the men-at-arms practiced archery. Aly leaned her elbows on the sill to watch and nearly yelped before she caught herself. Someone had come up with a new game.

Nawat stood against the wall, relaxed and alert. Before him two men-at-arms were preparing to shoot. Dove stood behind one archer with a handful of arrows, while the d.u.c.h.ess held arrows for the second archer. Aly's mind told her that the d.u.c.h.ess would hardly consent to murder just as the first man shot. The second man shot immediately after him. Then both set fresh arrows to the string and shot steadily, arrow after arrow, one at a time, until they had exhausted all the extras held by the d.u.c.h.ess and her stepdaughter.

Nawat caught them all with grace and ease, s.n.a.t.c.hing the arrows from the air as if he had all day to do so. When the archers finished, he gathered the heap of arrows at his feet and carried them back to their owners.

He's sofast, Aly thought in awe.I couldn't do it, and I'm no slouch! She sighed, wishing Da were here to see it. He'd taught her to catch daggers in midair, but this game was much more hazardous.

The game was not done. The men-at-arms repeated the experiment with javelins, then hunting and combat spears. Nawat caught them all, moving so fast Aly couldn't follow his hands. She cheered him and the men-at-arms on.

When the bell rang to remind the household it was nearly time for supper, he looked up at the applauding Aly and waved. "This is my favorite game," he called to her. "Do you want to play?"

"I wouldn't dare!" she cried, laughing, before she retreated into the room.

She'd seen men catch knives before. She had seen the finest archers in the Queen's Riders draw an outline in arrows of someone positioned against a wooden fence or wall, just to show they could do it. She had never seen anything like this.

Sarai and Dove ran in. Sarai smiled at Aly. "You should haveseen your face! Did you know he could do that?" she asked as she collapsed on her bed.

Dove unstrung her bow, shaking her head. "He's amazing," she said, coiling her bowstring.

"You know, maybe this horrible old place isn't so bad," Sarai told the ceiling.

"Not if these wonderful men keep showing up."

Aly raised an eyebrow at her. "I wouldn't try kissing him," she warned. "It wouldn't be what you expect."

Sarai wrinkled her nose. "Aly!" she complained. "I found out he eats bugs! I'm not kissing a man with bug breath!"

Aly blinked. I don't remember him tasting of bugs when he kissed me, she thought. I'd better pay more attention next time.

Her mind promptly reined her up. This was highly improper. There would be no next time. Her task was looking after the Balitang children, not mooning over someone, particularly not a crow turned man.

Even if hecould pluck arrows from the air.

The next morning Aly, still on a goatherd's hours, walked out of the keep into the dawn. The sun had just cleared the walls to light the inner courtyard and the young man who straddled a bench there. Aly stopped to watch him carefully glue pieces of feather onto the wooden shaft.

Nawat looked up at her with a smile that lit his eyes. "You are beautiful in the new light," he told her. "If I were the Dawn Crow, I would bring you the sun to hatch as our first nestling."

Aly blinked at him. Her heart felt strangely squeezed by some powerful emotion.

She bit her lip to distract herself from a feeling that made her horribly unsure. "Have you been kissing anybody?" she asked without meaning to, and gasped. She had let words out of her mouth without thinking, which was not like her! Worse, they were such personal words, ones he might feel meant personal feelings she did not have! This was the kind of thing that other girls said, those girls who were not bored by all the young men who had courted them. How many handsome fellows had sighed compliments to Aly while, unconcerned, she had mentally wrestled with breaking a new code? At home she never cared about her suitors enough to worry if they kissed other girls. She scrambled to blot out what she'd said. "Not that it's any of my business, but you should understand, people have a way of kissing for fun, without it meaning anything serious, and I'd hate for you to think someone wanted you to mate-feed them just because they're kissing-" Stop babbling, her mind ordered. Aly stopped.

Nawat's smile broadened. That disturbing light in his eyes deepened. "I have kissed no one but you, Aly," he a.s.sured her, serious. "Why should I kiss anyone else?"

Aly gulped. You can continue this conversation, or you can talk about something less . . . giddy, she told herself. Less frightening. "You know I won't always be around," she said abruptly. "I don't belong here, really."

"Then I will go with you," Nawat said. "I belong with you."

He doesn't know what he's saying, Aly told herself. He doesn't know what that means.

She looked at him, arms folded, trying to keep any extra feelings from leaping out. "What are you doing?" she asked, to change the subject to anything less dangerous. Then she grimaced. He was fletching arrows, as always.

She glanced at his bench, then bent down. He was fletching, but these arrows were heavier, and the feathers he used were not bird feathers, but Stormwing.

"How did you cut them up?" she wanted to know, genuinely curious. More sc.r.a.ps of cut-up steel feathers lay on the bench.

Nawat pointed to a long piece of what looked like black, chipped gla.s.s. "Shiny volcano rock," he told Aly. "Chip the edge until it is sharp. That cuts Stormwing feathers. They come from the heat of the place where Stormwings were born."

Aly touched the gla.s.sy blade. "Obsidian," she said. "That's its name."

"Yes," Nawat replied. "Shiny volcano rock." He set a length of steel feather into a thin groove filled with glue and held it in place.

Aly didn't see a single cut on his hands, though the feathers were lethally sharp. "Won't they be too heavy for the glue?" she asked.

"I shaped the glue. It holds Stormwing feathers," Nawat answered.

"Stormwings really are born in volcanoes?" Aly inquired, curious.

"In the beginning time, when they were first dreamed," replied Nawat, setting another piece of steel feather in its slot. "Now, if carrying an egg does not kill the mother, they are born from steel eggs." He looked at Aly and sighed, his dark eyes wistful. "The eggs are too heavy for a crow to take."

"You've already taken enough from Stormwings," Aly told him, pointing to the small pile of glinting feathers beside his bench. "You could have been killed."

"There is a trick to it," he replied, and blew lightly on his fletchings.

Holding the arrow shaft before one eye, he squinted down its length. "Perfect,"

he declared, and set the arrow down.

"It seems like a lot of trouble and risk when goose feathers are safer to work with," Aly remarked. "What is a Stormwing-fletched arrow for, anyway?"

"They are mage killers," replied Nawat. "No matter if the mage is powerful, if he has great spells to protect him. A Stormwing arrow will cut through illusion and magic."

Aly whistled softly, impressed. "Take very good care of those, then," she told Nawat. "We might find a use for them."

"I made them for you," Nawat said, giving her that radiant, innocent smile.