Inheritor

Certainly Jase was.

But dammit, there were things he needed to know too. And he was going to find out, if they could just shake loose some answers.

19

It was a long, long ride at a fair clip after that. Nokhada disliked eating dust and fought to get forward, which Bren fought to prevent, not wishing to leave Jase alone, even if the spacing necessary to the mechieti for their sheer body size made conversation difficult.

That meant that the strangers to Ilisidi’s company all rode in a knot that strung out at times, but never broke entirely apart so long as Bren kept a tight rein on Nokhada, who eventually seemed to resign herself to the notion that due to some failure of ambition or temporary insanity on her rider’s part they were not going to dash forward and attempt to occupy the same space as Cenedi’s mechieta—for maybe this little while.

Ilisidi, meanwhile, ignored them to hold consultation with the armed young men who took her orders, and one or the other would fall back to the rear guard. Bren kept glancing at the horizons, asking himself what was going on. There was no recourse to the pocket coms, nothing to indicate any problem. But something had changed.

There was a wicked, angry streak in this woman, not just in a human opinion but in twospecies’ ways of looking at it. Ilisidi had been genial at the di

This morning she’d ceased to make things difficult for her staff and, astride Babsidi, whose four strong legs carried her with more speed, agility and strength than any man alive, she began to make things difficult for them. It was her way of saying to the world, he began to think, Those who follow mehave to follow at disadvantage and difficulty. It was the condition of her life. She was notaiji. But those who served her treated her wishes as if she were.

And to the powers around Tabini she said, When you who rejected meas aiji suddenly want my help, damn you all, you’ll bleed for it.

So the aiji’s security (along with the paidhiin, who were excused from the normal considerations of man’chi and courtesies due, but not from the suffering part of it) didn’t get full information from her, either: they were simply supposed to follow in blind obedience whenever fortune and chance, those devils of Tabini’s designs, put his agents temporarily under her instructions.

That was one way Bren summed it up, having seen it in operation at Malguri and again in the Padi Valley.

Or possibly it was nothing of retribution on Tabini at all.

Perhaps it was just the native style of the old-fashioned, unabashed atevi autocrat she was—as old-fashioned in some ways as the fortress of Malguri off in the east—to make them follow her only under her terms.

As if, ateva to the core, she provedthe direction not only of the man’chi of the mechieti she lent them, but that of the men she led.

Bren reasoned his way to that precarious point, while slowly stretching muscles he only used when he skied and when he rode, and bruising points of contact he onlycontacted when he rode. He’d asked for it. He’d asked for it for good reasons, but he’d forgotten how badly one could ache after a ride with Ilisidi.

There was, however, the suffering of the boy from Dur, who now rode with inexpert desperation and, being taller, leaned more, with a more committed center of gravity.

The boy from Dur fell off, and fortunately held to the harness on his way down.

The dowager kept going, as Bren reined in, as the boy’s mechieta tried to keep going, as Banichi and one of Ilisidi’s men reined in and Jago went on with Jase, who had no success stopping Janari at all: if the herd was going, Jase was going.

“Bren!” Jase called back in alarm, as if he were being kidnapped.

The boy from Dur meanwhile proved that one of atevi weight and from a standing start (or from upside down with one foot still in the bend of the mechieta’s neck and the other on the hither side of the beast, while hanging onto the saddle straps) could not leap or even crawl back into the saddle. To a likely devotee of television machimi, it was surely an embarrassment.

“I’d get off,” Banichi said dryly, as he, Bren, and Ilisidi’s man Haduni all watched from mechieta-back. “I’d make him kneel and get up from the ground.”

One suspected if anyone could dothe television trick, Banichi might, but the boy from Dur gave up his foothold on the mechieta’s neck and hopped to the ground, whereupon the mechieta decided he was through for the day and decided to wander off.

The boy was clearly mortified, took a swat with the riding crop while holding to the rein and the mechieta bolted, jerking the rein from the boy’s hand and flinging him flat.

Haduni rode after the mechieta, which was on its way to join the herd.

The boy nursed a sore palm and bowed and bowed again.

“I’m sorry, nandi. I’m very sorry.”

“Shouldn’t have hit him,” Banichi said. “That’s for ru

“Yes, nadi.” The boy, a lord’s son, bowed, clearly in pain.

Meanwhile Haduni had caught the mechieta and brought it toward them.

Banichi tapped a strap on his mechieta’s saddle. “Hold and tuck up,” Banichi said, and that was something Bren had seen in the machimi, too. For the short distance they had to go, the boy held to the saddle strap while Banichi swung to the other side and counterbalanced, and they met Ilisidi’s man and the recovered mechieta.

Then the two men gave the boy a very quick lesson on how to get the mechieta’s attention with a tug on the rein, where to touch the crop to get it to kneel, how fast to get his foot into the stirrup, and how to use the animal’s momentum to settle on, with what tension of the rein. It was familiar stuff. And it was a good lesson, which the boy from Dur seemed to take very gratefully.

“Very much better, nandi,” Ilisidi’s man said.

“You have a chance,” was Banichi’s judgment, and they set off at a brisk clip toward the rest, who were now over the horizon of a land that didn’t look all that rolling. But it was. And the dowager, Jago, Jase, and the rest were as invisible as if they’d sunk into the sparse, gravel-set vegetation.

It wasn’t the only time they had to stop for the boy from Dur, whose mortification was complete when, at one such crisis, the mechieta led him a chase, body-length by body-length, as it grazed on the fine spring growth and the boy would almost lay hands on it only to have it move on.

There was laughter.

“Someone should help him, nadi,” Jase said, as if suggesting he should do it; but Bren shook his head. “They laugh. If they meant ill, they wouldn’t. If the boy laughed it would be graceless and impudent.”

“ Why?”

“Because, nadi, it would signal his mastery of the matter.” The mechieta eluded the boy another body-length, and the boy this time made a sprint for it. The mechieta, almost caught by surprise, bolted, and the boy went sprawling, clutching his leg. There was laughter at that, too, but fainter, and one of the men got down to see to the boy and another chased down the errant mechieta.

“Good try, boy,” the dowager said. “Bad timing.”

The boy, clearly in pain, bowed. “Thank you, nand’ dowager.” And limped over to the mechieta the man brought back for him. He properly had it kneel, had it hold the posture, the lesson of his last fall, and got on with dignity.

“Good,” Ilisidi said shortly, and Bren guessed there was—if not devotion forming in a young atevi heart, for atevi reasons: man’chi would determine that—at least a knowledge that respect could be won from her.