The Gathering Storm

He crossed the room to sit on the bed.

“I am thinking of the sorrow in my heart,” she said warmly, “now that we journey close to the borderlands.”

“Are you sorry I’m leaving?”

“But of course! Now that you are leaving they are at me again, all those grasping relatives! Marry this lord! Marry that lord! Don’t be selfish with your wealth and independence! How good it was when they could not insult me with their offers because they feared to anger you!”

He grinned, twining a strand of her copper hair between his fingers. “You could enter a convent.”

“I think not! All this praying would be very bad for my knees. I am very careful of my knees. Among my people it is said that after too much kneeling, you can no longer ride a horse.”

“Then will you let your uncle choose a husband for you?”

“That old fool! It is very lucky he cannot touch my inheritance, or he would have married me himself even if the church would call him a whore for it. Is that the right word?”

He withdrew his hand from her hair. “That would be incest.”

“So it would. I am thinking of marrying the one they call the White Stallion, Prince Arhad’s eldest son by the Arethousan woman.”

“Ah. The lady with the white-blonde hair.”

“Yes, that one. Why is it that men find her so fascinating? Already she is an old woman, at least forty. I cannot see it.”

“Women can be beautiful in many different ways.” He traced the shape of her body from the shoulder, along the dip of her waist, and up along the ample curve of her hip. Her copper-colored hair and lush figure did not make him think of Liath each time he set eyes on her. Ilona had her own exceedingly pleasant charms.

She stretched to savor the touch of his hand. “Men who find so many women beautiful in so many different ways are the ones who break their hearts and steal their treasure!”

“Ilona, has any man ever broken your heart?”

“Of course not!”

“Or stolen your treasure?”

“Do not laugh at me, you heartless man. My mother chose my first husband very carefully!” She burst into the laughter he found so attractive. “When she found us in bed together! It was a good thing he was the son of a princely family. Alas that he died so young. My second husband smelled bad. I am determined not to make this mistake two times.”

“Thus the White Stallion? He’s handsome enough, a good fighter, young, and he looks clean and maybe he even smells good.” That was another thing he liked about Ilona: she smelled good. She burned perfumed oils in the lamps that lit her chamber, oil of violets, if she had them, or vervain or sage. Tonight a garland of sweet woodruff hung on a nail above the window, stirred by the soft breeze. Even from this distance he could smell its dusky scent.

“He is not so powerful in Geza’s court that he will think he can rule me. I do not like to be ruled.” She shifted onto her back and eased herself up onto the bolster that lay along the head of the bed, resting her head on a bent arm. “You would make a bad husband for me, Sanglant.”

“You’re not the first to have said so.”

She laughed again and let her free hand caress his shoulder. “Ah, yes. What was I going to say?” She seemed distracted by the feel of his skin, and certainly the way she stroked him made it difficult for him to pay attention to her words. “Of course. The White Stallion. My mother as a girl spent three years among the veiled priestesses. They serve the Blind Mother, who is one of the gods worshiped by those who follow the old ways. My mother would be amused to think that even though I abandoned her ways to embrace the God in Unity, I will have brought a man called by the name of the Blind Mother’s companion to serve in my bed.”

By this time he had relaxed onto one elbow, beside her, but the comment made him sit bolt upright. “Do you mean that when a white stallion is sacrificed at midwinter, he is going to be husband to the Blind Mother? That is not how I heard the ritual explained.”

“You heard what the men say. This is what the women know. Our grandmothers brought the old ways from the grasslands when we came to Ungria four generations ago. Out in the wild lands, the Kerayit shaman women still take a handsome young man as a companion, to keep their bed warm.”

“As a slave, Brother Breschius told me. A pura, which means ‘horse’ in the Kerayit speech.” For an instant, Sanglant had the uneasy feeling that Ilona had been playing with him all along, these past months, as though she were pretending that he were her pura. Maybe she wasn’t as fond of him as he had become of her. But it was impossible to guess anything when she laughed like that, and maybe it didn’t really matter.