border. "Perhaps if you shut your mouth, the snoring would not be so bad."
I didn't bother to answer. The thundering of the stud's hooves drowned out anything I might say.
The thunder in my skull drowned out the desire to even
try.
We hadn't done much, Del and I. Not when you really think about it. We'd just gone south
through the Punja hunting a missing brother, stolen by Southron slavers. To Julah, the city near
the sea, where we had, with little choice, killed a tanzeer. That sort of offense is punishable by
death, as might be expected when you knock off a powerful desert prince; except Del and I had
gotten clean away from Julah and her freshly-murdered tanzeer. And gone on into the mountains
at the rim of the ocean-sea, where we'd encountered Vashni. The tribe that held her brother.
Except he wasn't really being
held;
not any more. Mute and castrated, he'd nonetheless managed
to make a life for himself. Del's plans for rescue were undone by Jamail himself, who clearly had
no desire to leave the tribe that had delivered him from a lifetime of slavery. While not precisely
a Vashni--they don't take kindly to half-bloods, let alone foreigners--neither was he suitable for
sacrifice. He'd made his place.
So we'd left him, and ridden north, across the border to Del's homeland. Where she had taken
me to Staal-Ysta, the island in black water, and delivered me as ransom to buy her daughter
back.
Well, not
exactly
--but close enough. Close enough that I'd discovered just how single-minded she
could be; to the point that nothing else in the world mattered, only the task she'd set herself: to
find and kill Ajani, the man who'd murdered her family, raped a fifteen-year-old girl, and sold a
ten-year-old boy into Southron slavery.
To find Ajani, she needed to be free of the blood-debt, which she owed to the Place of Swords,
high in Northern mountains. Where she'd left her infant daughter to find and kill the daughter's
father.
And, eventually, where she'd offered my services, me all unknowing, to pay part of her blood-
debt.
My
services... without even asking me.
Now, I've always known women are capable of doing just about anything they set their minds to,
once they've made a decision. Getting
to
that decision isn't always the easiest thing, or the most
logical, but eventually they get there. And, when pressed to it, they make promises they have to,
no matter what it takes.
For Del, it took me. And very nearly our deaths.
Oh, we.'d survived. But not before I wound up with a Northern sword, a magical
jivatma
as
dangerous as Del's--only I didn't know how to key it, and it damn near keyed
me.
And then, of course, there had been that thrice-cursed dragon, which wasn't a dragon at all, and
the sorcerer called Chosa Dei.
A man no longer a man. A
spirit, I
guess you'd call him, who now lived in my sword.
Ahead of me, riding hard, Del twisted in the saddle. Horse-born wind snatched at white-blonde
locks, tearing them free of burnous. Pale, glorious silk masquerading as hair... and the flawless
face it framed, now turned in my direction.
I have never failed, not once, to marvel at her beauty.