An Armory of Swords Read online

  They boiled out of the mine in a rush. One limped, and might have been left behind. Tegan grabbed the little boy and thrust him into the arms of a larger urchin.

  Were they gone? Were all of them gone? Against the roar of the battle outside, she strained to hear any whimper, any scuffling sound at all. She searched in the low tunnels where they had hidden, her eyes wide to try to see in the dark. There was nothing, no one.

  Ahead of her, a smoky lamp guttered and went out. The air reeked with malice, not a true scent, a trace of heaviness, of old evil. Between her breasts, the foil-wrapped stone gave off a dull, nauseating heat. Tegan clutched it tight in her left hand. She must call Ninidh here. If the demon devoured her, would the Lady Idane hear that Tegan had battled here, and lost? Would she be happy, knowing that Noya had been the better choice to train as her successor?

  Noya was the best, the brightest, the girl who had gone out to lead Tegan into camp. Tiny Noya, so fast, whose quick attacks darted through Tegan’s guard. Caedrun, who coached the girls at swordplay, matched them often in those hot hours of drilling, slow Tegan, fast Noya, the reward for the exercises a jug of cool water in the shade, so precious.

  Always, Noya, the winner, drank first.

  Sometimes there were four, or six, women summering in the high country, sometimes there were twenty. Waking, Tegan learned to count bedrolls, to look for new faces, and later, to see who had slipped away in the night, off on some errand that might last days or longer—two of the women round the fire that first night were gone by morning, and still gone in autumn.

  There were no griffins here.

  There was no Sword. Tegan had not seen it again, the Lady Idane’s blade serviceable and plain, as ordinary as her unremarkable riding-beast grazing in the alpine meadows.

  There were, sometimes, women with babies slung on their backs who walked into camp and stayed a day or two, laughing in the deep shade and yelping in the cold water of the stream where Tegan had fallen. Others came to other streams; they moved camp five times that summer. Some of the women wore long skirts or brocade, and those seemed never to have carried swords at all, but came to sit beside the Lady Idane in the long afternoons, to speak to her in quiet, rambling phrases, or to listen. All of them wore tiny silver arrows around their necks, a match to the one Tegan had found in the earth and given to the lady.

  The women talked of voyages, of the proper churning of butter, of the wiles that would hold a man, or send him away. Tegan listened, soaked up what she heard as if she were a dry sponge returned to water.

  They came from everywhere, these women, seldom taking up the sword but keeping their skills honed in summer camps or winter caves, a network of women that spanned the kingdoms. And when they did bring out their bows or their blades, at necessity, they fought well.

  The Lady Idane pulled them to her like a lodestone pulls iron. She said little, but when she spoke it seemed she had distilled a rambling bucketful of talk into a few drops of strong brandy. Quiet, calm, she seemed uninvolved in the activities around her, distanced from them. But when she said a word here, put her muscle to a task there, questions got answered, things fell into place as if even stones and trees hastened to do her bidding. Tegan watched her, fascinated, envious.

  Sometimes she felt the lady’s eyes on her, her measuring, skeptical evaluation. What did she measure? What did she want?

  Tegan grew shy around the lady. She hung back from the others, she said little. She watched and listened.

  The world, seen from these high mountains, seemed laid out like a board game. Men, duchies, kingdoms, all were pieces to be moved if only the hand that moved them was skillful enough for the task. Swords were one move in the games these women played, but they were only used when other moves were blocked.

  “There’s too much to learn,” Tegan whispered one night, sore from a drubbing Noya had given her. Tegan’s head swam with the Lady Idane’s explanation of the true cost of a bumper crop of barley. As the Lady Idane had it, a loaf of bread in Small Aldwyn would be dear in two years, when those who had sold their grain too cheap planted other crops, unless certain merchants in the foggy cities to the north could be persuaded to pay a fair price for this year’s barley. It made a sort of sense, but only if Tegan held the pieces in her mind in a certain way. Good crops can cause famine?

  “Nobody can learn everything,” Noya said. “You want too much.”

  “The lady said that the first time I met her. She was right.”

  “She likes you, Tegan.” Noya yawned and pulled her blankets up over her nose.

  “She’s never pleased with anything I do.”

  “That’s how I know she likes you,” Noya said. She smiled, tucked in her bedroll like a brunette caterpillar, and blinked up at the stars. “Get some rest, Tegan. All of this thinking is making you skinny.”

  Skinny? Tegan pulled her arm out from under her blanket and looked at it. It wasn’t skinny, it was slender. Well.

  In two breaths, Noya was asleep.

  Tegan backed out of the tunnel. What needed doing now needed doing at the mouth of the cave. When she opened the foil and released the demon’s soul, her life would hang on a thread of slimmest chance. She had no armor against the demon Ninidh, against any demon.

  At least she could stand in sight of daylight for this task.

  Beyond the fallen grate, a cold spring drizzle wetted the fighters. The men of Idris fought better than Osyr had planned. Green and gray mingled with bronze and black, and over it all lay the screams of riding-beasts and men, the stink of fresh blood. Bodies lay trampled in the mud, but Tegan saw no children. They would have fled the battleground, and if the gods were kind, they had scattered.

  Her arm ached with the demon’s longing. Now, before Osyr’s battle was won or lost. Now.

  Tegan held the foil-wrapped stone close to her lips. “Ninidh?” she whispered. “Ninidh, do you hear me?”

  Noya came to sit beside the Lady Idane when the silver quiverleaves were going gold on the high slopes, Noya sent out in skirts for provisions but was back in her breeks now, and happier for it.

  “What news from the pass, Noya?” the Lady Idane asked.

  Noya settled close to her feet of her lady, snuggling in like a puppy, and the lady stroked her hair. She has never stroked mine, Tegan thought. She finds more fault with me than with anyone here. Tegan looked down to hide the envy that might show on her face, and resolutely picked through the beans that would be tonight’s dinner, discarding the odd pebble or twig here and there.

  “Men are leaving the lands of the Lord Idris, for his wizard has found a mine there and they say that strange humors rise from the ore. Others are traveling there to work the mines, having heard that the pay is good.”

  The Lady Idane nodded, and Tegan knew that Matana, who had a gift for alchemy, would not be in camp by morning, but on her way to test the ores for safety or for useful essences.

  “In far Salton-on-Fen,” Noya said, “they say a Nereid lives near a spring, and has enchanted it so that all who come there tell her secret things.”

  “Nereid? Hmph. Meredith is setting herself up as a Nereid, is she? A flashy one, for news to travel here this fast. Well, that’s an old name for us, and not so far off,” the Lady Idane said. “True, we need water and stay close to it, but any creature does. Water stays low to the ground and goes around what it can’t go over. It follows whatever course it must take, but it wears away the strongest stone, in time.”

  “It works by stealth, then,” Tegan said.

  “Yes, stealth,” the Lady Idane asked, her eyes not on Tegan, but on a pattern of light and shadow cast by the branches overhead. “Stealth, deception, the skill to turn aside a blow and direct it elsewhere, the ability to let an enemy see what she fears most, and fight herself rather than you.”

  The lady carried the Sword of Stealth, one of the twelve, Sightblinder, its story told one night by the fire, Matana singing of all the half-remembered Swords of legend.

  Hid
den or no, the Lady Idane carried it, wielded it at times. Tegan closed the knowledge in herself, the questions. How did you come by this? For what purpose do you carry it?

  Tegan felt the lady’s attention focused on her. She felt as exposed as a bug turned up from under a stone. Noya had gone off on some task, had slipped away without a sound. Her absence left an intimacy between them, Tegan and the lady.

  “Ask yourself. What did the boy in the clearing really see?”

  The lanky boy had stared at a green wall, and seen—

  Reflected in a haze of red, crimson livery, the brotherhood he had not yet chosen. He had seen himself a Red Temple guard, drug-crazed and desperate for the next coin, terrified that the man beside him might be more crazed than himself, that his “brothers” would turn on him and cut him down.

  When I fight against Noya, I see—grace like a darting swallow flying at sunset, speed I will never have. I see my faults, not hers.

  “He saw his own faults, my Lady.”

  Idane smiled and stayed silent for a time.

  “The seasons change so quickly. It’s almost time for some of us to move back into the lowlands for the winter,” the Lady Idane said.

  Some of us. Not all of us. A few girls came to the summer camps every year, fewer remained for a winter’s training. So Tegan had learned. Noya would stay, certainly, and Havoise and little Jibben. But would she be with them when they went to the winter caves and learned letters and lacework, and things of leechcraft that a visitor from the White Temple taught?

  Tegan’s fingers found a pebble, rough in the smooth beans. She tossed it toward the stream, got up and walked away, feeling the Lady Idane’s measuring gaze on her back.

  Outside the mine, Osyr’s banner wavered, dipped, and fell. A shout went up and the banner rose again. Tegan caught sight of Seagus, his red beard red with blood. He threw Osyr’s banner to one of his men and roared with triumph.

  Release the demon now, if ever she were to be released. She felt power gathering, drawn to the beacon in her hand.

  “Come forth, Ninidh,” Tegan whispered.

  The demonstone grew hot. It burned against Tegan’s palm like a coal. She struggled to hold it and opened her hand. A puff of smoke rose from her singed flesh.

  The smoke drifted upward. Tegan could not take her eyes from it, from the swirling forces that circled the confines of the cave. They drifted on currents of desire and release, and centered themselves in the fetid air.

  Transparent as blown crystal, a woman’s form took shape in the mouth of the tunnel. It floated above the filthy floor of the cave, and laughed a laugh like shattered ice.

  Ninidh. It was Ninidh. The demon spun like a whirlwind. She darted into one of the tunnels. Tegan heard her cooing at what she found there. Ninidh returned, her ghostly hands filled with raw gems in all the colors of moonlight.

  The demon glided toward the shattered grate, and freedom.

  “Stay!” Tegan shouted.

  A demon’s voice laughed and a demon’s wild joy filled the cave.

  Stay? With all the wide world before me, and all these gems in my hands? Almost, mortal, I would let you live, for the joy you have given me when you unlocked my powers.

  Tegan gripped the demonstone in her fist. It had grown cold as ice.

  That bauble? The demon danced around Tegan like a whirlwind. I’m not in it now! You have freed me!

  Tegan slashed at the transparent form with her sword, a foolish weapon against a demon. The sword would not serve her for this.

  What would?

  Tegan had sought strength in skills of seduction garnered from the Red Temple. She knew the way power moved among the world’s divided kingdoms. She knew how to use the weaknesses of men or women as needs be. Nothing she had learned could help her leash this demon, this evil wraith that Tegan had hoped to bind against a greater evil.

  Blow after countered blow, the sword growing heavy as lead, the heat of the autumn sun on her shoulders, and old Caedrun’s voice grating in her ears, “Strength! Strength and speed, Tegan, make the sword light in your mind and you will find it easier to wield.” Until Tegan wanted to cry, and would not, because the Lady Idane had come to the edge of the clearing and was watching, seeming not to watch.

  Had the lady sighed, shaking her head in frustration? Tegan couldn’t really see anything in the shade but the brown on brown of autumn leaves. There had been frost at the edge of her blanket this morning.

  In a match against Noya, thinking, this is useless. I will never best her, I will never fit in here, with these women of grace and laughter who are always at ease, always accepted, ever the gentle word comes to their lips and at times I can’t speak at all.

  Noya will stay and I will go back to the beanfields. I will carry my sister’s baby on my hip, not a sword.

  A man in gray stood beside the Lady Idane. The two of them turned away.

  There was only the clearing, the heat, Noya bringing her sword once more toward Tegan’s guard in this last match, this final time, this last time for losing.

  I outreach her, Tegan thought. I always did. She is fast, but there is a pattern that she follows. If I move here, turn her on her own path, then, then—

  A calm came upon her, the world slowed down for her to use, for the lady had turned away and there was only Tegan, centered in a still place born of despair and loss where nothing mattered except the blade’s edge, the pattern of its reaching.

  See, how slow this is, the back of Noya’s knee exposed, the dark sureness welling up within me, a touch there. So! So slowly, I turn as she trips, my sword a part of my arm, weightless, a hawk stooping from this far and distant sky where I’m alone—

  Noya lay on her back, the point of Tegan’s sword at her throat.

  Well. Well, Tegan thought.

  Noya rolled away, laughing at the expression on Tegan’s face.

  Tegan was only human, no emperor’s child. She held no magic except a demonsoul stone, and no enchanted sword. She could never win against a demon. She kept her back to the outside world, trying to create a barrier of mortal flesh between Ninidh and freedom. Her grip on the sword began to loosen. She fought to hold it, useless though it seemed to be.

  Ninidh, laughing, held a king’s ransom of opals in her hands. What weakness in that, that a mortal could use?

  Tegan reached for a calm place that she had once found, a still place born of despair where nothing mattered except the blade’s edge, the pattern of its reaching—

  Tegan struck at the demon’s hands. Her sword could not cut demonflesh, but it struck the gems. Raw opals scattered across the cave.

  The invisible substance that was Ninidh shrieked in outrage. The demon sank toward the floor. Her insubstantial fingers plucked at the tossed gems. The stones drew themselves into little heaps as Ninidh tried to pick them up again. Tegan let herself feel the smallest bit of hope.

  “Well fought,” old Caedrun said. “Well fought.”

  Noya, on her feet again and still smiling, handed over the water jug.

  It was so good, so wet, Tegan’s thirst had been like a fire in her throat. She drank, and drank again, and handed the jug to Noya. Far to the west, thunderheads were growing, black at their bases and moving quickly.

  “Tegan! Come here, please.” The Lady Idane called. “Caedrun, see to the packing, if you would, and Noya. We will be leaving sooner than I expected.”

  Tegan rushed to keep up with her, the lady speeding along a path through the crackling leaves, this once careless of their noise. The man in gray—had he been real? Tegan felt eyes on her, appraising eyes, but when she looked, she saw bare branches, bright evergreens waiting for snow. No man anywhere.

  The lady carried a wrapped bundle on her back. It contained, Tegan knew, the Sword.

  They reached the sourcespring. The stream that welled from it led down toward the pass, the road back into the lowlands.

  Beside it, crouched, an impossible beast lapped at the water with its long tongue, its
bronze wings furled tightly on the length of its huge back. The beast backed away from the spring and growled. The lady shoved at it with her shoulder and scratched a spot behind its ears.

  “This is Tegan,” she told the beast. “Take her scent. Tegan, come closer.”

  Reek of giant cat, hot breath, the beast reached out its long neck and sniffed at Tegan’s hand. Its rough tongue flicked lightly along the skin of her wrist, taking a delicate taste.

  “Stand still,” the lady cautioned.

  Tegan stood still. It had never occurred to her to move. She was almost too awed to be frightened.

  The Lady Idane mounted the griffin and settled the weight of the Sword over her shoulders.

  “This is not to be your life. You will leave us now.”

  The protests that rose in Tegan’s throat died at the look on Idane’s face.

  “Here.” Idane tossed a small sack tied with a familiar green ribbon. Tegan caught it. It was heavy.

  “You won’t understand, not for a long, long time. Nothing I can say will—Oh, bother! Go quickly. We are hunted.”

  The Lady Idane touched her heels to the beast’s side. The griffin stretched its wings and rose toward the western pass, toward the gathering storm.

  Rejected, cast aside, named unworthy. Tegan had hated the Lady Idane with deep hatred, and tried to mask it in disdain. Who did she think she was, this uncaring woman, but a surrogate mother to a bunch of foolish women who lived in tents? They were fools, fools who saw themselves as knights-errant for the weak. Feh. Their schemes and manipulations seemed to do so little in the world.

  Tegan despised them. They were petty, and cruel, to cast her aside.

  I’ll show you! Tegan thought. She clenched her fist at the sky and choked back tears. I’ll show you!

  Wealth and power, and satins, and kingdoms to do her bidding, that was what Tegan had decided would be hers, in that moment when the griffin vanished forever. How were they gained in this world? How did a woman gain them? Not by eating beans and wearing rough linen in a mountain camp.