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The single word came to Kelthys from Walasfro. It was as if the stallion were incapable of forming a more complex thought, and yet that one word carried every nuance of his complicated bewilderment, joy, confusion, gratitude, and rejoicing.
“I don’t know.” Kelthys knew his own voice sounded almost as stu
He broke off, turning his head and following the direction of Walasfro’s gaze as he felt the stallion’s fresh surprise. Two more coursers, one of them huge for a mare, and more brutally scarred than any they had yet seen, paced slowly out of the stable. The bigger of the two—and the younger, Kelthys realized as Walasfro’s herd sense touched them—had lost an eye and an ear, and her winter-thick chestnut coat bore the bold white lines of what must be wicked scars. She was obviously still adjusting to her half-blindness, but she carried her maimed head with the same regal pride which infused her high-stepping walk.
Walasfro’s herd sense identified the older courser beside her as the senior surviving mare of the Warm Springs herd. Not that she was very old. Coursers, unlike horses, routinely lived for as long as sixty years, although they matured at only a slightly slower rate. But this mare—the oldest surviving member of the entire Warm Springs herd—could not have been more than nineteen years old.
That single fact drove home how utterly devastated the herd had been, but that registered only peripherally on Kelthys’ awareness. Something else seized upon his attention, and he felt the disbelieving astonishment of Walasfro and the Bear River stallions as they, too, saw the stumbling, utterly exhausted hradani between the two coursers. Saw him scarcely able even to stand, yet forcing himself erect as he came to greet them. And saw his arm across the back of that half-blind, horribly scarred filly as she walked protectively beside him and lent him her strength.
“It’s glad I am to be seeing you, Sir Kelthys,” Bahzell Bahnakson greeted him in a frail husk of his deep, powerful voice.
“I’m still trying to accept that he and the others managed to beat us here in the first place!” Kelthys replied, as he moved the dandy brush briskly against the direction of the hair with a strong circular motion.
He stood in Lord Edinghas’ stable, carefully grooming Walasfro. All around them, other stable hands performed the same service for the Bear River stallions, and drifting hair from shedding winter coats seemed to be everywhere. In many ways, it was a reassuringly domestic scene, but Walasfro’s residual disbelief echoed from all the coursers, hanging in the air like another, invisible cloud of hair.
There had been no time yet for details, and the filly—Gayrfressa—had insisted on sending the exhausted champion off to rest. One of the Bear River stallions, a massive red roan with black mane and tail, had attempted to delay her. Kelthys hadn’t been able to hear any of their conversation, but he’d seen Gayrfressa shake her head impatiently, then actually bare her teeth, and the older, bigger stallion had backed off. He and all of his companions had fallen back, flowing apart to open an avenue through their midst for Gayrfressa and Bahzell, and as the hradani half-walked and half-staggered past them, leaning heavily on the filly, they had tossed their heads high, then lowered them in perfect unison. Kelthys’ jaw had done its best to drop as he recognized the salute coursers normally reserved only for their own herd stallions.
He very much doubted that Bahzell had had any suspicion of the honor those stallions had bestowed upon him. Even if he’d been a wind rider himself, he was so totally exhausted that very little of what happened about him could have registered. But the sight of coursers bowing—offering their homage, really—to a hradani had been so profoundly u
But he was obviously the only human in the entire holding of Warm Springs who did, he told himself.
Walasfro admitted.
“There was no time for him to wait,” Kelthys said. And, as if to underscore his own earlier thought, another human voice spoke quietly.
“No, there wasn’t,” it said, and Kelthys turned to look at the speaker.
Hahnal Bardiche stood beside him, personally currying the huge roan who had attempted to accost Gayrfressa. The wind rider arched an eyebrow, and Hahnal shrugged.
“I’m not a wind rider, Sir Kelthys, but I’ve spent all my life around coursers. I can usually tell when a wind rider is talking to himself and when he’s talking to his courser. And, under the circumstances, there’s really only one thing you and Walasfro are very likely to be discussing at the moment, isn’t there?”
“I can’t fault your reasoning, Lord Hahnal.” Kelthys gri
“They did,” Hahnal agreed quietly. “Well, the Bloody Swords rode, but every one of the Horse Stealers ran.”
“I know,” Kelthys said, and shook his head again. “I’m just having trouble believing it. But over and above that, I’ve come to know Prince Bahzell well enough to know he must have realized exactly how dangerous it was for a hradani to get that close to wounded coursers. Especially without someone like Walasfro to talk to them for him.”
“It was more dangerous than even you can possibly realize, Sir Kelthys.” Hahnal’s young voice was dark, and he looked away for a moment. “To my eternal shame, I doubted that Prince Bahzell truly was a champion of Tomanak. Worse, I was prepared to hate him even if he were a champion. But he never hesitated. He knew we were losing them, that none of them would have survived if he’d waited for your arrival … and that every one of them was half-mad with terror and pain and the poison working on them. They didn’t see a champion of Tomanak, either, Milord. They saw a Horse Stealer hradani, and I still don’t understand how he kept them from trampling him into the mud. But he did.”
The young man looked back at Sir Kelthys, his eyes shining with wonder.
“He healed Gayrfressa first. And not just her wounds, Milord.” He shook his head slowly. “He healed her soul, called her back from the Dark and gave her back herself. I’m no wind rider, but I have a touch—too little to train, but a touch—of the healing mage talent, and I felt what he did. It was nothing at all like what a mage healer would have done. It was … it was—I don’t know the words to describe what it was, Sir Kelthys, but he offered himself to whatever was consuming her. He took all of it upon himself in her stead, and then he—and Tomanak—peeled it away from her and destroyed it.”
Lord Edinghas’ son shook his head again.
“It took everything he had to cha
“I think it almost killed him,” Hahnal said very softly, staring at his hands as they moved across the roan stallion’s coat. “I think it could have killed him … and that he knew it. And he’s a hradani. Not a Sothoii, but a hradani.”