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Dathgar had become rather more comfortable with Bahzell, but even Tellian’s companion remained … uneasy in close proximity to him. Still, coursers were at least as intelligent as most of the Races of Man, and both Dathgar and Gayrhalan, like Sir Kelthys’ Walasfro, had been wise enough to recognize that Bahzell was not the slavering hradani stereotype for which the coursers had cherished such hatred for so long.
Nonetheless, he recognized that it behooved him to approach these coursers cautiously. None of them had ever met him; Sir Kelthys had not yet arrived, so there was no wind rider and his companion to vouch for Bahzell; and these were the brutally traumatized survivors of a merciless massacre. They were unlikely, to say the least, to take the sudden appearance of eight hradani well.
But when he stepped into the stable and saw the condition of those survivors, it was hard—even harder than he had anticipated—to remember the need for caution and distance.
The seven adults were bad enough. Even now, they shivered uncontrollably, as if with an ague, rolling their eyes and flinching away from any unexpected sound or movement. Seeing horses in such a state of terror would have sufficed to break any heart. Seeing coursers reduced to such straits was the stuff of nightmare, and not just for Sothoii like Alfar or Edinghas.
Not one of the terrified survivors had escaped unwounded, and one of the fillies had lost her right ear and eye and bore an ugly, ragged, wound that ran from the point of her left hip forward almost to her shoulder. She must have been almost four years old, and it was obvious that her technically “juvenile” status had not kept her out of the heart of her herd’s battle. Her right knee was lacerated, with a deep tear extending downward along the ca
She bore at least half a dozen other, scarcely less brutal wounds, and there was something wrong about all of them. Coursers healed almost as rapidly as hradani, yet those deep, wicked trenches still oozed. Their discharge crusted her shaggy winter coat, and Bahzell could detect the scent of corruption from where he stood, even through the normal stable smells about him. The injured filly’s head drooped, and her breathing was labored, yet her outward damages, grievous though they might be, were less deadly than the wounds no physical eye could see.
Bahzell felt every muscle tighten as his vision shifted. It was an aspect of his champion’s status that he had yet to become fully accustomed to, and his jaw clenched as he seemed to find himself suddenly able to look inside the filly’s body. He could “see” the powerful muscles, the tendons and bones, the lungs and mighty heart …
And the vile green pollution spreading slowly, slowly through every vein and artery in her body. Any lesser creature, he knew, would already have succumbed to the infiltrating poison, and even the filly was fading fast.
Nausea churned deep in his belly as the sheer evil of the creeping contamination washed over him. It took a wrenching physical effort to tear his eyes from her and turn that same, penetrating gaze upon the surviving foals.
Bahzell Bahnakson grunted, as if someone had just punched him in the belly. The foals had been less rent and torn than the adults who had fought to protect them, but they were also younger and smaller, with less resistance to the poison spreading from the wounds they had taken. The poison, Bahzell realized, which no horse leech, no physical healer, could possibly see or recognize.
“I’d thought you said as how there were after being eight foals,” he said to Alfar, and even to his own ear, his deep voice sounded harsh.
“There were, Milord Champion,” Lord Edinghas said grimly before Alfar could respond. “We lost the worst hurt of them, a colt not more than eight months old, yesterday.” The lord warden shook his head, his face ashen. “We shouldn’t have, Milord. A horse with those wounds, yes, but not a courser. Never a courser.”
“He’s right,” another voice said from Bahzell’s right, and the Horse Stealer turned towards the speaker. It was a young man, not yet out of his twenties, whose face and chestnut hair proclaimed his parentage. And whose eyes were hard and hostile as they met Bahzell’s.
“My son, Hahnal, Prince Bahzell,” Lord Edinghas said.
Unlike his father and the armsmen guarding the stable, Hahnal was neither armed nor armored. He wore a smock, instead, marked with old bloodstains—and some not so old—and his youthful face was haggard.
“Hahnal is one of our best horse leeches,” Edinghas continued. “He’s snatched an hour or so of sleep here and there, but he’s refused to leave the stable since they returned.”
“And Phrobus’ own good it’s done!” Hahnal half-spat. His big, capable-looking hands clenched into fists at his sides, and he turned to stare at the visibly failing coursers with eyes in which despair was finally strangling desperate determination. “We’re losing them Father. We’re losing all of them.”
His voice cracked on the final word, and he turned away, scrubbing at his face with one palm. Bahzell could almost taste his humiliation at his display of “weakness,” and, without even thinking about it, he reached out and laid his own hand on the young man’s shoulder.
“Don’t touch me, hradani!” Hahnal wrenched away from the contact, spi
“Hahnal!” his father said sharply.
“No, Father.” Hahnal never looked away from Bahzell, and his voice was icy cold. “You are Lord Warden of Warm Springs. You may grant guest right to anyone you choose. Including a hradani who claims to be a Champion of Tomanak. That is your right and prerogative, and I will obey your word in it. But I will not be touched or petted and cosseted by a Horse Stealer, be he ten times a champion!”
“Hahnal,” Edinghas said sternly, “you will apologize to—”
“Let be, Milord,” Bahzell said quietly. Edinghas looked at him, and Bahzell raised one cupped palm as if pouring something from it. “I’d no business touching or offering aught without Lord Hahnal’s let. And any man as has driven himself as hard as it’s pikestaff plain your son has here, is after deserving the right to speak his mind. I’ll not hold honesty against any man, however little it may be that I like what he’s saying.”
Edinghas hovered on the brink of saying something more, but Bahzell shook his head, and the lord warden clamped his teeth against any further reprimand.
“Now, Lord Hahnal,” Bahzell continued, turning back to the young man and speaking in a voice which was as level and dispassionate as he could make it, “I’m thinking your father said as how the colt died yesterday?”
“Aye,” Hahnal said shortly, his tone abrupt, as if he didn’t know quite what to make of Bahzell’s response to his own anger.
“And what was it you did with his body?”
“We buried it, of course!” Hahnal snapped. “Why, hradani? Did you want to—”
He stopped himself just in time, but the words he hadn’t spoken hovered in the stable, and his father’s face went white with shock, and then beet-red with fury. His hand twitched at his side, as if to slap his son, and this time even Bahzell’s expression tightened.
“No,” he rumbled in a voice which flowed like magma over ice, his ears flattened. “No, Milord. I’ve no desire to be eating such, though I’ll admit, if pressed, that there are some as make me remember why my folk were after earning the name ’Horse Stealer’ in the begi
Hahnal started to respond hotly, but then he looked directly into Bahzell’s eyes, and what he saw there was a bucket of ice water in the furnace of his rage. Bahzell said nothing more, made no slightest hostile gesture, yet Hahnal—who, however intemperate and exhausted he might be, was no coward—actually stepped back before he could stop himself.