Страница 14 из 137
She smiled thinly at him, and he frowned back uncertainly, obviously confused about where she was headed.
“You see,” she explained to him calmly, “if I were a noblewoman, I’d probably be all upset and flustered by all those nasty things you said about me. Noblewomen don’t approve of public brawls or shouting matches, so I wouldn’t have the least idea what to do about them, or how to respond to your rudeness. But if you say things like that to a peasant, she doesn’t get upset. No,” Kaeritha shook her head again, “she just gets even.”
He was still frowning at her in confusion when she took one precise step forward, the quarterstaff snapped up, and its iron end cap smashed down on the arch of his right foot in a vicious, vertical blow any piledriver might have envied.
Kaeritha Seldansdaughter might be short compared to a hradani, but she was quite tall—and very, very strong—for a human woman, and the heckler let out an unearthly screech as she brought the staff crunching down with both hands. The soft leather upper of his boot offered no protection against such a blow, and the sound it made was remarkably like the one produced by crushing a wicker basket with a hammer.
Despite himself, Bahzell winced in sympathy, but Kaeritha’s expression didn’t even flicker as her victim jerked his wounded foot up where he could clasp it in both hands. He hopped on his other foot, howling in precariously balanced anguish, and she whipped the lower end of the staff up in a perfectly timed and placed blow to his left knee. Administered with even the slightest error, that stroke could have crippled her victim for life, but Bahzell had watched Kaeritha working out with her staff too often to worry about that. He had no doubt that the heckler’s kneecap, unlike his foot, was intact, whatever it might feel like, but the hapless loudmouth went down as if he were a sapling and Kaeritha’s staff were an axe she’d just applied to his roots.
He hit the paving with a fresh bellow of agony, and even before he landed, the staff was back upright before Kaeritha, and she was leaning on it once more. He writhed and twisted on the ground, hands flashing back and forth between foot and knee, clearly unable to decide which source of anguish most required comforting, and Kaeritha shook her head. Her eyes, Bahzell noticed, never left the heckler’s companion. The object of her attention seemed as well aware of it as the hradani, and he was very careful to keep his hands away from any weapon.
“There now!” Kaeritha said scoldingly to the writhing man at her feet. “You went and made me forget how important it is for a miserable imposter like me to ape a proper noblewoman’s ma
“And I suppose you’re thinking as how this was a tactful, diplomatic way to be handling our little problem?” Bahzell asked in a quiet voice, one eyebrow quirked and his ears half-cocked, when she turned her back on the writhing heckler and strolled casually back up the temple steps to him. He shook his head. “I’m thinking it may be you’re the one to be a mite more careful about ’local sensibilities’ and being diplomatic and all.”
“Why?” she asked i
Chapter Five
It was raining again, and no mere drizzle this time, either.
It seemed to do an awful lot of that on the Sothoii Wind Plain, Kaeritha thought.
She leaned one shoulder moodily against the deep-cut frame of a tower window, folded her arms across her chest, and stared out across Hill Guard Castle’s battlements at the raindrops’ falling silver spears. The sky was the color of wet charcoal, swirled by gusty wind and lumpy with the weight of rain not yet fallen, and the temperature was decidedly on the cool side. Not that it wasn’t immensely preferable to the bone-freezing winter she’d just endured.
Thunder rumbled somewhere above the cloud ceiling, and she grimaced as a harder gust of wind drove a spray of rain in through the open window. She didn’t step back, though. Instead, she inhaled deeply, drawing the wet, living scent of the rain deep into her lungs. There was a fine, stimulating feel to it, despite the chill—one that seemed to tingle in her blood—and her grimace faded into something suspiciously like a grin as she admitted the truth to herself.
It wasn’t the rain that irritated her so. Not really. As a matter of fact, Kaeritha rather liked rain. She might have preferred a little less of it than the West Riding had received over the past several weeks, but the truth was that this rain was simply part and parcel of the real cause of her frustration. She should have been on her way at least two weeks ago, and instead she’d allowed the rain to help delay her travel plans.
Not that there hadn’t been enough other reasons for that same delay. She could come up with a lengthy list of those, all of them entirely valid, without really trying. Helping Bahzell and Hurthang steer the Hurgrum Chapter safely through the rocks and shoals of Sothoii public opinion, for example … or impressing the error of their ways on the local bigots. Those had certainly been worthwhile endeavors. And so had lending her own presence as another, undeniably human, champion of Tomanak to Bahzell’s diplomatic mission. Unfortunately, she had to admit that however useful her efforts might have been, they were scarcely indispensable. No, her “reasons” for continually postponing her departure were begi
Her thoughts broke off as a tall, red-haired young woman rounded the passageway corner with a hurried stride that was just short of a trot. The newcomer, who came to an abrupt halt as she caught sight of Kaeritha, was both young and quite tall, even for a Sothoii noblewoman. At fourteen, she was already at least six feet tall—taller than Kaeritha herself, who was considered a tall woman, by Axeman standards—and she was also begi
Her expression was a curious blend of pleasure, half-guilt, and semi-rebellion … and her attire of the moment was better suited to a second under groom than an aristocratic young lady, Kaeritha thought wryly. She wore a worn pair of leather trousers (which, Kaeritha noted, were becoming more than a bit too tight in certain inappropriate places) under a faded smock which had been darned in half a dozen spots. It also showed several damp patches, and there were splashes of mud on the girl’s riding boots and the thoroughly soaked poncho hanging over her left arm.
“Excuse me, Dame Kaeritha,” she said quickly. “I didn’t mean to intrude on you. I was just taking a shortcut.”
“It’s not an intrusion,” Kaeritha assured her. “And even if it were, unless I’m mistaken, this is your family’s home, Lady Leeana. I imagine it’s appropriate for you to wander about in it from time to time if it takes your fancy.”
She smiled, and Leeana gri
“Well, yes, I guess,” the girl said. “On the other hand, if I’m going to be honest about it, the real reason I’m taking a shortcut this time is to stay out of Father’s sight.”
“Oh?” Kaeritha said. “And just how have you managed to infuriate your father so badly that you find it necessary to avoid his wrath?”
“I haven’t infuriated him at all … yet. But I’d like to get back to my quarters and changed out of these clothes while that’s still true.” Kaeritha cocked her head, her expression questioning, and the girl shrugged. “I love Father, Dame Kaeritha, but he gets, well, fussy if I sneak out to go riding without half a dozen armsmen clattering around behind me.” She made a face. “And he and Mother are both begi