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With this comforting thought and the vision of Tallia as close as his own cloudy breath in the chill air, he slept.
Rain edged with slivers of ice batters the canvas tents of their camp. His warriors do not need the tents to sit out the storm, though it makes the wait more comfortable. But the human slaves do. Another warleader would let the slaves sit in the freezing rain and half of them would die. So are the weak winnowed from the strong. But he is not like the others.
He touches the Circle at his breast, circles his finger around its smooth grain in memory of the gesture made by the child—seen but not forgotten—at the door of the crypt in the cathedral at Gent. That child he had let go free, because she had reminded him of Alain.
The slaves sit in the warm billow of smoke and heat from the fire he has allowed them to start, up against a rock face beneath the canvas tent. One man stares at him, then looks quickly away when he realizes he has attracted his master’s attention.
“Why do you stare?” he asks. In his dreams he has learned the language of the Soft Ones.
The slave does not reply. The other slaves look away quickly, hunching their shoulders, their way of trying to avoid notice, of pretending to be invisible as the spirits of air and wind and fire are invisible to all but enchanters.
“Tell me,” he commands. Wind stings his neck and tines of ice shatter on his back where he crouches at the open end of the shelter.
“I beg your pardon, master,” says the slave without looking up again, but even so he cannot keep the hate out of his voice.
“You saw something.” The long winter’s night shrouds them, blanketed by the ice storm and serenaded by the howling wind. By the red sullen light of fire he watches the slaves stare at their knees and their hands, even this one, the one who spoke. The one whom he caught looking. “I will know.”
“You wear the Circle of Unity, master,” says the slave at last, knowing that to disobey is to die. “But you do not worship God.”
He touches the Circle, drawing his finger round its curve with that same remembered gesture. “I do not hide the Circle.”
“It is the way you touch it, master.” The man’s voice gains strength, of a kind. “It reminded me of … someone I once knew.”
Someone this man does not wish to speak of. Bored by the storm, irritated by the delay, since no ship can brave the seas in such conditions, he forces the slave to go on. “Do you have a family as, I think, is common among your kind?”
“No, master.” Here, finally, the slave lost his fear and let his hate take wing. “Your people murdered them, all of my kin: my wife, my sisters, even my poor innocent children.”
“Yet you serve me.” This human interests him. He has fire, perhaps even some stubborn strength of earth in him. The penned slaves who have lived among the RockChildren for many generations are more like dogs than people, but these new slaves to whom he has given sticks for weapons, better food, and decent clothing all come from the southern lands, and they think before they bark. That is why he believes they will be useful.
“I have no choice but to serve you,” replies the slave.
“You have the choice to die.”
The slave shakes his head. “You wear the Circle, but you do not know God. The Lady weaves and the Lord cuts the thread when our time has come. It is not for us to choose to die. Death comes to us by Their will.”
He examines the other slaves, who hunker down. One, at the limit of the canvas, shaking in the raw wind, turns and turns about until another slave, closer in, sees her plight and changes places with her, there at the edge of the shelter where the fire’s warmth scarcely reaches and the wind’s breath bites with killing cold. After a bit, yet a third slave takes the worst place. They help each other live. Is this the mercy that Alain Henrisson spoke of?
“Do you have a name?” he asks.
The slave hesitates. He does not want to offer his name. The other slaves stare, watching, surprised out of their pretense of mute stupidity. None of these, to whom he has given favor, are mute or stupid; he has studied his slaves carefully, just as he studies his livestock.
Still the slave does not speak.
He lifts a hand and unsheathes his claws.
“My name is Otto,” the slave says at last and reluctantly.
The others whisper and then silence themselves. He can smell their nervousness beneath the hot pitch smoke of the fire and the cold blast of the storm.
“Do you all have names?” he asks.
To his surprise, they do all have names. They speak them, one by one, a sound drawn out of each one as an arrow is pulled from a wound, carefully, with respect.
Are they all enchanters, then? No, he reminds himself, they are merely different. They are not RockChildren. They are weak, and yet, in their weakness, they survive by helping each other.
He sheathes his claws and shifts backward far enough that he can stand outside the shelter of the canvas awning roped down and angled to give them shelter at the cliff face. The canvas flaps and moans in the tearing wind.
He steps out from its sheltering angle into the full fury of the storm. The icy wind drives into his face, its touch like that of thousands upon thousands of knives flung from the wind’s hand into the wild air.
