Anyway, I'm trying to make the most of being ill by writing more of my NaNoWriMo novel. I made the 50,000 word count in November (insert celebratory dance here), but I didn't actually finish the book, so . . . I'm still working on it. My goal is to finish it by the end of December.
I'm not posting the full book on this blog, as I mentioned earlier, but I thought I'd post the occasional chapter or two, so here's another chapter! I posted chapter one earlier; this is chapter five, and it ends part one of the book. Enjoy.
Chapter 5: The Outlaw’s Hand
She understood, by the time they neared the outlaws’ camp enough to see the warm glow of its hidden fires, why they had chosen to make this desolate place their refuge. The treacherous sliding of the stones beneath each step, and their sharpness, meant it would be nigh upon impossible to guide any horses in this direction, severely crippling the king’s military advantage. The tumbled maze of stone was also a perfect place for concealment, filled with shadows and crannies, tall shelfs of rock she had to crane her head back to see the tops of, and so many winding ways around the stones it would be extremely difficult to attempt any organized, concentrated attack, even if the soldiers were afoot. A thousand questions burned upon her tongue, but she knew well enough to keep silent once the two outlaws had agreed to escort her to their hidden encampment. They did not trust her, she knew, and to ask any questions like the ones she really wanted answers to--whether they always lived in this place or moved around, how many men were currently fighting under One-hand’s direction, what their own names were, and whether they had featured in any of the stories she knew--would be the utter height of folly. The very fact that they had not blindfolded her or made any attempt to disguise their passage was ominous. She knew enough from her talks with Kerl to know that they were not merely being polite; if she proved untrustworthy, she would not be leaving their camp alive.
She processed all this without fear, the same dispassionate resolve that she had felt while revealing the scar at her throat still with her, like a glass she was watching the world through, sharpening every crack in the stones, every shadow, every sound, but distancing her too, so that though she was keenly, brilliantly focused and aware of everything around her, none of it felt real enough to touch. Even her peril would have seemed far away if she had not been so acutely aware of how closely her guides were watching her every movement.
The tallest of those guides, the man who had been first to speak to her and who seemed to be the leader of the two, flickered a grin her way as though sensing the direction her thoughts were tending. It was not an invitation to friendship, but it was not an unkind smile, either.
“The sentries on this side have already seen us approaching. They will have signaled the fires; you are expected.”
“I did not see anyone,” she said, startled into replying. His grin became a little less guarded, a little more genuinely amused.
“That is the point,” he said.
They reached the firelit circle of the camp much more abruptly than she had anticipated; one moment she could see nothing but the rumor of light, and the next it was all around her. It was very quiet, but in a hollow, expectant way which betrayed that the men sitting around the fires or lounging idly against the surrounding rocks had only lately fallen silent--in anticipation of her arrival, she realized. They were all looking towards her, most of them quite openly, their faces all slightly blurred and seemingly identical in the weird-patterning play of fire and dark. Her guides led her forward into the midst of the men, who all moved aside and out of her path, the same look of intent interest on each face, of curiosity, but without a word spoken. Then the bearded man held out a hand to prevent her from walking further, and the one who had smiled at her continued to pick his way through the rings of fire alone, moving from one to the other like a cat moving from stone to stone across a running stream. She heard a few of the men murmur questions as he passed them, and one laughed, but he made no reply, and soon he had gone beyond her sight behind a standing stone to where yet more small fires blazed. She took a deep breath and, not knowing where to look, let her eyes wander without paying much heed to where, being more intent upon her right hand which she still held loosely near the pocket where her mother’s ring was sewn and her knife was concealed.
She did not have to wait long. Soon the man returned, and with a strange look at her which she did not know how to read, he spoke. She had expected him to speak softly, and so was startled when he instead used a raised voice, deep but clear and carrying. He was speaking not only to her, but also for the mens’ benefit.
“You will come with me, lady. Cole, you are to return to the outer lines, and if the men have questions, tell them as little as you can but enough to satisfy them. Understood?”
“You are understood, Martin,” the bearded outlaw said, with a curt little nod, and he turned at once back towards the darkness and disappeared into it, almost silently, his feet sure upon the treacherous stones. She turned back to face the man he had called Martin, and the question must have been clear upon her face for he offered her a little smile again as he beckoned her to follow him.
“He is waiting,” he answered.
The many glittering eyes that had watched her so far followed her as she followed Martin, and she knew it was because although she felt as though she was stepping into a story, for all the men here it was as though she had stepped out of one. How many times, she thought, had they whispered amongst themselves about their leader’s capture, and wondered how it was that he had been taken? Had he told them all? How much did they know? All the agonizing days back home in Kope when the stories had been building around her and Gold-Head and what had transpired that night in the tavern, she had never once thought of the kind of stories which would be building just as surely here, in the place where he came from.
In the dimness between the fires she stumbled, bruising her ankles, but she did not accept Martin’s outheld hand. It was a much smaller fire that he led her to, separate from the others by just enough distance to be noticeable, and she saw only a few men sitting around it, black shapes with no faces, or only half-faces, limned and carved with red light, and one held a flute of silver in his hand, and one was leaning with his face in his arms as though asleep, but none were speaking, and she looked from one to the next in a strange almost-frantic anticipation, eager but shrinking, and shy but not abashed--
And then he was there--
Dangerous things are not always beautiful, Kerl had said. Beautiful things are not always dangerous, she had replied. But there were also those rare things which are both dangerous and beautiful, and those were the most deadly of all.
She was surprised to see Tamarin looking so much the same as he had all that time ago--oh, a lifetime, it seemed!-- from the clothes he wore to the color of the firelight upon his face and in his eyes. And here she stood, guarded by a swordsman and in peril of her life, firelight upon her face also and her heart pounding. It was all the same, she realized, and she must look much the same also, despite her unwomanly garb, but she felt different. She had chosen freely, this time, and had won a smile from the man who they had called Martin, and she was not afraid.
One-hand, he had been renamed, and as he stood to greet her she felt her eyes drawn to the empty space where his sword hand had been, shaken to see that emptiness even though she had known she would find it. The actual flesh and bone of his arm was hidden by his long sleeve, so she saw no scarring, but that was almost worse. She looked up and saw that he was watching the direction her eyes had gone with a wry, bitter patience, and bit her lip in anger at herself. He had clearly had to withstand many gawping stares towards his empty wrist before, and her own staring had done nothing to commend her to him. His eyes were shadowed, but there was a hint of sarcasm in his strange voice when he spoke.
“So,” he said, “my hand has returned to me. Somewhat prettier than before, too.”
She had imagined, all the time she had wandered in the wilderness searching for him, what he would say and what she would reply, but she had not imagined this. He was watching her face very closely, and so she found herself speaking the plain truth, instead of any of the pretty or impressive speeches she had composed in her head before.
“I waited all winter,” she said, “and I have been unhappy in knowing the debt I owe, but they said you had died, and so I could do nothing. When I learned the truth, I had to come.“
He made a dismissive gesture with his one remaining hand. The movement was graceful, as all his movements were graceful. But it was the grace of a dragon and a swordsman, not a dancer or an artist.
“You need not have come.” he said. “Know that what I did, I would have done for any innocent person those lakshistha dragged into the matter. It was not your affair, and it was not your blood to spill. That is all.”
And it is still not your affair, he seemed to be warning her, though there was no reproach in his voice, only the laconic, blunt gentility of a man who says plainly what he means to say and no more. And, of course, a swift flash of anger that she recognized in the word lakshistha even if she did not recognize the word itself. Later she would learn it was a curse of a particularly venomous kind, taken from the tongue of the Ali’oi of the eastern kingdom. Tamarin kel-Athor, as he was named in that land, was indeed far-traveled. Lakshistha is translated literally as ‘slow burning’, as in, ‘They Who Burn Slowly In Aara’. Though courteous enough to her, Tamarin held a bounty of gold for his head for good reason, and he did not forget nor forgive an injury.
“I know you would have done the same for any person,” she answered him. “But I happened to be that person. And even though I became involved only by chance, I wanted to apologize.”
“Apology accepted,” he said, not angrily, not gratefully, just spoken words with nothing fathomable behind them.
Even so, she felt the dismissal like a chill, and forgoing all attempts at niceties went directly to the heart of her reason for seeking him out, suddenly not caring that the other men could hear her.
“Let me stay with you,” she said.
To his credit, he did not look surprised. After a short pause, he nodded towards Martin without looking at him.
“Stay here, brother. You,” he said to her, “follow me.”
He led her a short distance away, far enough to speak in relative privacy beyond the circle of light cast by the fire. When they halted, they stood closer to each other than they had before, and she did not know what to say. She waited, sensing that he needed to be the one to speak first. After some seeming hesitation, he did.
“There are women who take the outlaw name,” he said, looking tired. “And of them I even have two under my command. But it is not common. And there are dangers to this life, which you should not accept lightly, no matter what debt you think you owe me.”
“I do not accept lightly,” she said. “I have given up everything I had to find you. And I trust you.”
“You trust me?” This is where, in the stories, he would have laughed at her, but although the slight bitterness had crept back into his voice again, he remained serious. “And yet you stand before me with a knife in your hand. Yes, I know. And Martin knew, and Cole knew. It is part of this life; either we are observant and survive, or we are careless and . . .”
She was careful to not look at his maimed wrist, and he did not finish his sentence. She was a little embarrassed at the transparency of her attempt at self-defense, but she tried not to show it. The little blade glinted as she drew it from her pocket and held it out to him. He did not take it.
“So you knew that I was armed, and yet you left Martin behind.” She said, “And that could mean, as I see it, any one of two things: Either you are confident that, even with one hand, you could easily subdue me if I sought to slay you--which confidence I am fairly sure is well-merited; I am no swordswoman yet--; or you trust me.”
She drew a quick breath.
“They would have killed me. All my life I have lived as one of the small people in the world, and yet I never really realized fully what that meant until the king’s man nearly killed me, and then when he did not, paid me for my time. I was a seamstress before, and after that night I became handmaiden to a fine lady, and she treated me kindly in her own fashion, but it makes no difference no matter how I try. I could never be happy like that again. They did not know me, and would have killed me; you did not know me, and yet you gave your freedom and your hand for me. Do not send me back to their world, with that knowledge still weighing upon me. Let me remain here. I will learn to fight for you, in place of the hand you lost; I will serve you faithfully, and stand against your enemies steadfastly, for it will not be servitude, not when you are the only one who treated me like a creature of worth, and when I owe you my life.”
“You need not know how to fight. All you need is a strong enough hatred. Is there anything you hate enough to fight against?” He asked, watching her closely with something almost like a smile tugging at the left corner of his mouth.
“Yes,” she said.
“Look at me,” he said. She obeyed, and he looked long and searchingly into her face, as she thought of William the captain calling She’ll do, from the bright open doorway, and of the weight of a silver penny in her hand. At last he stepped back.
“It may be,” he said quietly, “that when we think of hate we think of the same things, you and I.”
There was a little night wind skittering amongst the stones, and the men at the fire had begun talking amongst themselves again, the low rumbling of their voices indistinct at their distance. The moon had risen above the thick clouds it had been clogged in and in response to both its silvery light and the reminder it gave of how late the hour was getting, the outlying fires were beginning to be stamped out. He looked at her.
“What is your name?” He asked.
“Aude,” she replied, shifting the weight of her rucksack from one shoulder to the other.
“Then I give you welcome, Aude, and--I thank you.”
They made their way back to his fire together, she walking upon his right hand side, and the voices of his captains rose like moths towards a light at Tamarin’s return.
