Phoenix Unbound
Page 39

Gilene sat not far from Saruke, weaving her dark hair into a braid. At some point, while he drank with the men outside and caught up with their lives over the last decade, she had bathed and washed her hair. The dim light from the cooking fire caught strands of red in her locks, creating a shimmering net that haloed her head. She no longer wore the Kraelian clothes almost reduced to rags from their journey. Instead she sat garbed in the typical dress of Savatar women—a long-sleeved wool tunic that fell to her calves over loose trousers tucked into ankle-high goatskin boots.
She raised tired eyes to watch him as he made his way to Saruke and sat down beside her. His mother squeezed his arm with one hand and continued stirring the contents of the pot with the other. “There is tea and stew. You must be hungry.”
He kissed her gnarled fingers. “Speak the trader’s tongue, Ani. The agacin doesn’t yet understand our language.”
“Is she truly able to wield fire?” Tamura asked in Savat, disregarding his instruction.
He nodded. “Yes, though she pays a price for it that our handmaidens don’t when she uses it.” He accepted the cup of hot tea and the bowl of stew Saruke handed him. “Did you eat?”
She nodded. “Aye. Your woman looks as if she’ll blow away with the next stiff breeze.” She gave Gilene a brief smile that was returned. “We thought it best to put something in her belly before she flew away from us.”
Azarion had finished most of his bowl when Saruke spoke again, her eyes glossy with tears. “What happened to you? They said you were separated from the hunting party. None could find you. All they brought back were your horse and your cloak, both bloodied. Your father was inconsolable.”
“Is that what they told you?” His hand clenched around his spoon. “It was the hunters who took me. I was beaten until I passed out. I woke up in Uzatsii, waiting my turn on the auction block.”
Tamura sprang to her feet, the half-finished bow held in such a way that Azarion expected her to nock an arrow and draw. “Who did this to you? I will cut out their hearts!” She still hadn’t spoken in trader’s tongue, but Gilene’s quick scuttle back told Azarion she understood perfectly Tamura’s outrage. And her threat.
He waved her back down. “Peace, midge,” he consoled her. “I’ll have my revenge soon enough.” He squeezed Saruke’s hand as tears tracked down her cheeks. “Yerga, Zabandos, and Gosan all had a hand in my enslavement. They were the ones who beat me and sold me to the Nunari. But they did so on Karsas’s orders.”
Tamura paced, pausing once to point at her mother. “I knew it.” This time she used trader’s tongue. “Didn’t I say those piles of sheep shit had something to do with his death? I knew they were lying!” Her nostrils flared, and her pacing threatened to wear a bare spot in the rug under her feet. She stopped again, hands on hips, to glare at Azarion as if he were somehow as responsible for his own abduction. “All three are dead, by the way. Yerga broke his fool neck from a fall out of his saddle. He was always too stupid to learn how to ride properly. Zabandos took a spear to the gut.” Tamura’s humorless smile stretched wide. “Got caught tupping a tirbodh’s wife in his own qara.”
Azarion didn’t know whether to cheer or curse. He had hoped to mete out justice to Karsas’s henchmen as well as to Karsas himself. It seemed fate had done it for him. “And Gosan?”
“Drowned in a spring flood.” Tamura’s waspish smile faded. “I don’t think anyone mourned him much. We all felt sorry for his wife. She’s a kind sort. Deserved better than him.”
There were more than a few widows and fatherless children in every clan camp. Some women grieved their men, others did not. If Karsas was married, Azarion would soon make his wife a widow and his children fatherless. “When did Karsas become ataman?”
Saruke answered him. “Right after your father died. He courted the Ataman Council long before that, and as the closest living male relative to your father, they considered him the next in line to succeed.”
It was as he expected, though hearing it made him want to howl his anger. “The Fire Council agreed?”
“Yes. There were none to challenge him and no agacin to naysay the vote of the Ataman Council.”
Azarion turned to Gilene, who listened with a confused expression. “The agacins have their own council separate from that of the atamans, and even more powerful. When an ataman is chosen by the other clan chieftains, they still must get approval from the Fire Council. If they don’t, then another must be chosen.”
Her eyebrows climbed toward her hairline. “You have a council of women more powerful than that of your men?”
Tamura’s sharp laugh filled the qara. “The Savatar value their womenfolk. Unlike Kraelians.” Her voice lost a little of its edge. “My brother says you are an agacin, even though you aren’t Savatar.”
Gilene nodded. “I can wield fire, yes, and I don’t suffer its burn.”
“Show us,” Tamura challenged. She pointed to the cook fire. “Strengthen the fire here.”
Gilene shook her head, refusing to rise to Tamura’s obvious baiting. Azarion was tempted to end it but sensed this was a play of dominance between these two, one where his interference wasn’t welcomed or helpful.
“I can’t,” she said. “Not now, anyway. I don’t know how it is with your agacins, but my power doesn’t draw from an endless well. I drained it weeks ago. I need time to replenish.”
Tamura snorted and shot Azarion a disdainful glance. “She told you she was agacin?”
“No. She didn’t even know the word until I told her. I’ve seen her summon and control fire with my own eyes several times.”
Saruke put more water on to boil for tea. “The Fire Council will want her to prove it to them.”
Azarion’s eyes met Gilene’s. Hers were dark, anxious, weary. “She can. That she doesn’t burn should be enough to satisfy them until all her power returns.”
For all that she had aged twenty years in the ten he’d been gone, Saruke rose nimbly to her feet and without aid or complaint. She motioned to Gilene and gestured to a pallet of blankets and furs. “Come. You and Azarion can sleep there tonight. For now you can rest unless you want to attend tonight’s celebration.” Gilene gave an adamant shake of her head, and Saruke smiled. “I didn’t think so. Go on. One of us will wake you if you’re needed.”
Gilene accepted the offer without protest, not even questioning Saruke’s assumption that she and Azarion shared a bed. For all practical purposes, they had done so since their sheltering with Hamod’s traders, always out of necessity and often for warmth. He inwardly cheered her lack of resistance to the notion of sharing this particular pallet with him. She didn’t like him, but she had begun to trust him a tiny bit, at least in this matter.
She slid under the pile of covers, still fully clothed, and turned to face the qara wall. In moments she was asleep, the curve of her shoulders drooping as slumber overtook her.
Saruke returned to her place and gave her full attention to Azarion, slipping back into Savat. “Now you will be truthful with me. What did you suffer at the Empire’s hands?”
He was reluctant to tell her, reluctant to recall those things that left a scar on his soul each time. “Everyone suffers at the Empire’s hands,” he said shortly. He did offer up one fact and left out the worst details. “I was the Gladius Prime.”