Skolian Empire - Quantum Rose Part 19

"How do you feel?" he asked.

"Hungry," she admitted.

"When did you last eat?"

"The day before yesterday."

"When did you last brush your hair?"

Her hair? What was wrong with her hair? "I don't know."

"Rest as long as you need. The cook will send breakfast." He kissed her, then stood up next to the bed. "I'll be back this afternoon."

Kamoj fell asleep even before he put on his cloak. She woke when a bondsgirl left her a tray with food. She ate the grain, rolls, and soup, then went back to sleep.

Cramps woke her the next time. Curled under the covers, she held her stomach until the pain subsided. Then she slept again. When next she awoke, the light had dimmed, and the roof sagged, heavy with snow. The braziers had gone dark. The air on her cheeks felt cold, but under the covers she stayed warm.

She rolled overto see Jax sleeping on top the covers. It wasn't his presence that surprised her: many people slept during early afternoon. But his cloak had fallen open and all he wore under it were his thin clothes. He still hadn't laced his shirt, leaving his chest exposed to the chill air. Did he even feel the cold? Such people existed, those almost unaffected by the killing climate. Vyrl claimed they had been bred for it, to better serve their owners. It suggested part of Jax's heritage came from slaves. No wonder Vyrl's people dreaded these Traders they fought, if Jax was a watered-down version of them.

He opened his eyes. For a moment he simply watched her. Then he sat up, rubbing his face. He got off the bed and went to the chest again, this time pulling out an armload of clothes.

Self-conscious, Kamoj sat up, holding the covers around her body. Jax came over and dropped the clothes on the mound of her body in the bed. The scent of spice-soap and new cloth wafted around her, fresh and clean.

"I need a bath," she said.

He nodded, then went to the tent entrance and spoke to someone outside.

Soon a bondsgirl appeared, carrying a vat of steaming water, towels and wash cloths, and a tray of soap. After the girl left, Kamoj looked at Jax, wishing he would go too.

"What's wrong?" he asked.

"Can you" She stopped. Would he hit her if she asked him to leave? "I'm cold."

Jax touched her arm. "You've ice-b.u.mps." He slopped a cloth in the steaming water, then wrung it out and pressed it against her face. Warmth spread its relief through her skin. But then Jax pulled away the blankets, letting in the chill of the air.

As Jax soaked the cloth again, Kamoj crossed her arms over her torso. "You don't have to wash me," she said.

"I know." He soaped up the cloth. "I like to."

He washed all of her, from her face to her feet, and dried her off with a towel.

Then he chose a black silk sc.r.a.p from the clothes, an underdress unlike anything she had ever worn, all bows and lace, its top a corset that pushed up her b.r.e.a.s.t.s and whittled her waist. He pulled the corset so tight she could barely breathe. Then he chose a velvet dress made from the same dark purple as his shirt and pulled it over her head. The dress covered her from neck to wrists to knees. Its flared skirt swirled around her legs, but the bodice fit so tightly she couldn't raise her arms. He finished with grey leggings made from Argali wool, then smoothed her hip chain into place over the wool and pulled down her skirt.

Leaning back on his hands, he surveyed his work. "You're beautiful, Kamoj.

Ironbridge colors suit you."

She gritted her teeth. "Thank you."

He gave her knee-boots, purple suede-lined with silver fur. After she put them on, he pulled her up to her feet by the bed and drew her into an embrace, folding his cloak around her body. It came to just under her eyes, like a veil of dark Argalian wool. As always when his mood eased this way, she felt intense relief mixed with another emotion harder to define. It ached within her, so extreme it hurt. Hate? Or love? It felt far less pleasant than anything she had experienced with Vyrl. But no one had ever promised love would be pleasant.

A chime came from outside, a mallet hitting a small gong. Jax raised his voice.

"What is it?"

His stagman stepped inside the tent. "The panel be here, sir."

Jax motioned Kamoj at the bed. "You can sit there."

Uneasy, Kamoj sat on the edge of the bed and folded her hands in her lap. The stagman let two people into the tent. The man she knew, an Ironbridge judge, one of Jax's advisors. The woman wore the robe of an Ironbridge priestess.

Although the designs embroidered along its sleeves and hem resembled spindly hieroglyphs, the codices named them with different words. Circuit diagrams.

Jax, the judge, and the priestess all sat at a wooden table across the tent.

Parchment crackled as the judge brought out his scrolls. The three of them were soon deep in a discussion. Kamoj felt dizzy from fatigue and lack of food, and barely able to breathe in the tight clothes, but she struggled to concentrate on their words.

They first considered the legal situation Jax faced. No precedent existed where a merger was so precipitately lost after so many years of investment. It was inconceivableuntil it had happened. They intended to draft legislation to make sure it never happened again. As much as Kamoj agreed, in principle, that they needed laws to prevent someone from disrupting their lives as Vyrl had done, it made her own situation no easier.

The Ascendant was a complication. Apparently its minions believed their laws applied to her people. Yet neither Jax nor his advisors feared reprisals. In fact, they seemed to consider the Ascendant an ally, albeit a wary one. For some reason its legal people wanted to know if Kamoj had consented to sleep with Vyrl. As far as she was concerned, her marital bed was none of their business. What they should have been worrying about was the economic disaster Vyrl had precipitated in the Northern Lands by yanking Argali out of its merger with Ironbridge, all the while planning to leave her province and her people.

When Jax began to tap his riding quirt against his palm, Kamoj recognized the sign of his anger. Nor was it directed only against her and Vyrl. Jax had no grounds to censure Maxard for bowing to Lionstar, so instead he and his advisors spoke of other matters, making Maxard sound incompetent, unfit for any position of authority. They started on Lyode next, calling her morals into question, and spoke of taking her away from her husband so she couldn't have children. Kamoj understood Jax's message: unless she cooperated, those she loved would suffer.

When they moved onto Vyrl, she almost gagged. They planned to claim he raped her in a drunken fit. The Ascendant's people had translated the contract scroll Vyrl had read at the wedding. It was indeed a merger contract, with gibberish about commercial licenses, zoning ordinances, business insurance, and property. Vyrl apparently could be held to its terms, which included provisions to negate a merger made through coercion.

Jax and his advisors all signed the doc.u.ment that annulled the Argali- Lionstar merger. When the judge said the Ascendant required Kamoj sign as well, Jax penned her name. Then they wrote down every term of the Argali- Ironbridge merger and signed that contract as well. Finally the judge rolled up the scrolls and put them in his valise. They all stood and talked a bit more, speculation about when the riders sent to Argali would return with news of the fires. Then Jax dismissed them.

When Kamoj and Jax were alone, he came over and smiled at her. "It is done, pretty rose. Ironbridge and Argali are merged."

Kamoj just looked at him. She had known all her life that someday this would happen, but she had never expected it this way, stripped of her power and freedom, with her province in flames. Had Jax deceived her all these years?

Perhaps. But she suspected it would have been different had Vyrl never interfered. Did Vyrl and his people have any idea how much damage they had done? Did they care?

Jax rummaged in the chest and brought out a silver brush with rose-colored bristles. He sat next to her, more at ease now, as if penning his claim to her lands, heritage, authority, and self had eased him.

He showed her the brush. "When you and I were betrothed, Maxard gave me a small inheritance your mother asked you be gifted with on your wedding day. This was part of it." He rubbed a curl of her hair between his fingers.

"Shall I brush it for you?"

She stared down at her hands in her lap. "All right."

He spent a long time with her hair, easing out the tangles with an ease she doubted came from taking care of his own hair. Then he brushed hers in long, slow strokes, from the crown of her head to her hips. Eventually he slid his arms around her waist and kissed her neck.

Outside, the gong chimed. Jax grumbled under his breath, then called, "What is it?"

"A rider came back from Argali," a voice answered. "He says it be urgent he speak with you."

"It had better be urgent," Jax muttered. He went to the entrance and pulled aside the flap. "Come in."

An Ironbridge stagman entered and bowed. "My apologies for disturbing you, Governor. But I thought you should know. They've doused the fires. Lionstar be riding up here now."

"The fires are out already?" Jax asked. "All of them?"

"Aye, sir. It be the metal birds. They spray a liquid that swallows flames."

"How did Lionstar find us? Tera hid the trail."

"He rides that wild greengla.s.s. The spirit animal."

Kamoj blinked. Greypoint had fetched Vyrl? She had never heard of a greengla.s.s doing such a thing.

"How many men does he have with him?" Jax asked.

"Seventeen stagmen. The rest ride to Ironbridge." He squinted at Jax. "A woman be with him too."

"Really?" Jax looked curious. "A bondsgirl?"

"I don't think so. An older woman. Grey and craggy. Not at all pretty."

Jax nodded. "You've done well. Get my mount and have sixty stagmen ready to ride."

After the man left, Jax turned to Kamoj. "So. He comes. Sooner than we expected but still too late."

"You're taking sixty men against seventeen?" she asked.

"Sixty stagmen and you." He spoke in a deceptively soft voice. "Make no mistake, Kamoj. You will let Havyrl Valdoria see that you are my dutiful and willing wife. If ever I believe you are even thinking otherwise, you will regret it." He shifted the quirt in his hand. "If you ever try to go back to him, I will do more than burn Argali. You will watch Maxard and Lyode die."

Kamoj wrapped her arms around her body. "I'll do what you want. Just don't hurt anyone."

"That is up to you." He took off his cloak and threw it on a chair, then went to another chest and took out his sword belt. She wondered what good he thought a sword would do against the Ascendant's defenses. Not that it mattered. Jax had already defeated Vyrl using the Ascendant's own laws.

Saints, but she wished she had spurned the Lionstar merger. Vyrl's people would never have let him attack Argali, even if such had occurred to him, which she doubted now. But how could she have known? Every one of his actions had sent a message in the ways of her people, carrying threats of violence and war.

Jax took her to the entrance of the tent. As he lifted the flap, Kamoj tensed.

They both had on only flimsy clothes, and his shirt was still unlaced, open to the air.

"Don't you need your cloak?" she asked.

He pushed her forward. "It will just get in the way."

Outside, freezing air blasted them, and the sky pressed down like a lid of pewter. The camp was busy with people. At one fire, a bondsgirl poured a steaming drink for a stagman, her smile shy and her gaze averted as he closed his hands around hers on the mug. Her yellow hair suggested she came from one of Ironbridge's poorer districts.

Kamoj's parents had forbidden the Argali army to use bondservants, and Kamoj and Maxard maintained that ban. Although in theory both Jax and the governor of the North Sky Islands allowed it, only Ironbridge could actually afford them. The indenture usually lasted only a few years, but that didn't change the fundamental nature of the servitude. After what Vyrl had told her, Kamoj understood better where the practice originated and why it made her so uncomfortable. When left to their freedom and their starvation, the slaves had fallen back on the only ways they understood. They enslaved one another.

Across the clearing, a group of greengla.s.s stags stamped their feet while stagmen tended them. By the time she and Jax reached the group, Kamoj was shaking from the cold, her breath coming in puffs of icy white condensation.

A boy brought a huge stag forward, Jax's mount Mistrider. The animal shook his head, his antlers glinting like gla.s.s, his opaline scales ghostly in the mist.

He stared down at Jax with green eyes slitted by vertical black pupils.

Mistrider's wariness made Kamoj wonder how often he had felt his master's quirt through his supple hide of jeweled scales.

Using a stool called a stagmount, Jax swung onto Mistrider. The greengla.s.s stamped and snorted, coming so close to Kamoj that she jumped back. When Jax motioned, she stepped up on the stool. Jax helped her up onto the stag, settling himself between the front and middle b.o.n.e.ridges so Kamoj could straddle the animal in front of him. Mistrider picked up her tension, prancing beneath her, growing more and more agitated.

Suddenly the stag reared, his front and middle legs pawing the air, his bi- hooves clanging together like crashing symbols. With Mistrider all the way up on his powerful back legs, Kamoj and Jax were high above the ground, at the height of two tall men. Kamoj gasped and clutched the base of his scaled horns, the only "handles" available.

Holding her around the waist, Jax yanked her hands away from the antlers.

"Never grab a stag that way!"

Mistrider came down, his bi-hooves pounding the frozen ground. Before Kamoj could catch her breath, the animal reared again, his head thrown back, his iridescent fangs barred. The stag screamed at the sky, a long, high cry that pierced the muted day. He crashed his hooves together again and again, until Kamoj feared they would shatter. Jax kept his arm tight around her, holding his reins with the same hand, his grip the only tether that kept her from flying off the animal.

With his free hand, Jax snapped his whip against Mistrider's flank. "Hai!" he shouted. "Be still!"

The stag came down and danced furiously to the side, invading the area around four other animals. They skitted away, stamping their feet and keening in quieter versions of the scream Mistrider had used to challenge the clouds.

The call of a flight-horn winged into the sky. Another horn answered, then a third. Moving together, the group headed into the forest, the animals falling into the intricate, complex rhythm of their six-legged trot. The riders took the traditional formation, half in front of Jax, half in back. Ever restless with tradition, Jax prodded Mistrider to the head of the company.

As they penetrated deeper into the woods, the noises of the camp faded. The mist suffocated sound, curling around the ancient trees. Drops of water clung to the needles. Scale dust glittered everywhere, in the air, in the mist, on the plants. Vines hung in great loops, draped over branches and twisted around trunks and fallen logs. Scaled ferns grew among the trees, their lacy heads nodding under the shifting weight of the bud-lizards that clung to the underside of their leaves, a motion all the more eerie because no wind disturbed the woods.

Kamoj saw the other riders before she heard them. She caught glimpses of stags and diskmail among the trees. Jax called out and the Ironbridge company halted, fanning out in a semi-circle several rows deep, with Jax at its center.

The Lionstar company emerged from the mist and stopped twenty paces away, greengla.s.s stags mingled with prismatic scale-trees. Vyrl's two bodyguards flanked him, clad in black, from their boots to their heavy jackets.

Both Jagernauts rode stags, huge animals big enough to support their bulk.

They sat on their mounts with an ease that unsettled Kamoj, another indication of how Vyrl's people so easily bent her way of life to theirs. Dazza and Azander rode on either side of the bodyguards, and the rest of Vyrl's stagmen fanned out from them in a much smaller semicircle than the one formed by Jax's men.

Neither Vyrl nor his people wore breathing masks. Light sheathed their bodies instead, like the shimmer curtains. Vyrl's clothes were gray with soot and his hair fell in disordered curls to his shoulders.

Kamoj's vision blurred in a haze born of fatigue, hunger, exposure, and lack of breath. She clenched her teeth against the cold. Vyrl was watching her, his face strained as if he were struggling to hear a distant song in the trees. She tried to make her thoughts placid so he wouldn't feel them.

Azander spoke. "Lionstar acknowledges Ironbridge."

The stagman on Jax's right answered. "Ironbridge acknowledges Lionstar."

"Lionstar invokes the Right of Inquiry," Azander said.

Behind Kamoj, Jax's hair rustled as he nodded his agreement to the Inquiry.

His arm tightened around her waist and he shifted the quirt until its tip rested on her thigh. She understood the warning.

"Proceed with the Inquiry," Jax's stagman said.

Vyrl spoke directly to her. "Kamoj, was it really your choice to go with Ironbridge?"

Her choice? Like ice water on her face, she realized how it must look: at the first chance, she returned to the people who had been at her side for most of her life.