Earthly Crown by Kate Elliott

being caustic.
    And abruptly, the thought triggered in Tess an upwelling of the love, of the heart’s warmth, she felt for her family—for Sonia and Katerina and Ivan and Kolia, for Niko and Juli, for Irena Orzhekov, for Nadine; for Aleksi, the brother she had adopted. And, God damn him to hell, for Ilya.
    “I shouldn’t have done it,” said Tess when Nadine halted her jahar in sight of the township of Basille. “I shouldn’t have come with you.”
    “Losing your nerve?”
    Tess chuckled. “What do you think? But perhaps the dramatic gesture wasn’t the wisest one.”
    “It will certainly get Ilya’s attention, though.”
    “Damn it, it was just one last thing too many. Yaroslav Sakhalin himself picked me out. He told both Bakhalo and Zvertkov that he wanted me in his jahar. You know what an honor that is! And then before I was ever consulted, Ilya goes around behind my back and tells Sakhalin that I’m to be left where I am: still in training. Still in reserve. He never lets me out of camp except if I’m with him or maybe, maybe, on a safe scouting expedition with Ilya’s picked thousand and Aleksi at my right hand.”
    Nadine looked at Tess’s scarlet shirt and black trousers, and then at her own, similar except in the stiff leather shoulder pieces and the pattern of quilting and embroidery running up the sleeves. “It’s true,” she mused, “that Sakhalin is not the kind of dyan to pick you out in order to curry favor with Ilya. He chose you on your merits, nothing else.”
    “Thank you.”
    “Still angry? It was an honor.”
    “An honor I’m never to receive the fruits of.”
    “Do you want to fight in battle that much?”
    Tess regarded her companion with a rueful smile. Behind Nadine’s left ear, where her black hair pulled away into a waist-long braid, began the scar that followed parallel to the line of the braid, all the way down. Nadine’s bronze helmet hung from her saddle and her lamellar cuirass was tied on behind, although most of her men wore cuirasses or scale girdles and belts. But then, Nadine preferred to keep her reputation for being reckless.
    “No, not that much,” Tess admitted. “But you know as well as I do that I can’t just have the privileges of my position. I have to accept the dangers as well.”
    “Otherwise,” said Nadine, slipping easily from khush into Rhuian, “you’re just a player in a masquerade. All show.”
    “Yes, all show. I don’t care to live that way. And I’m not jaran. So I don’t have to. Ilya keeps forgetting that.”
    “You’re wrong, Tess. He’s never forgotten it. That’s why he wouldn’t let you go to the coast with him.”
    Tess went pale with anger, and her fingers clenched, and unclenched, on her reins. Zhashi shied sideways, and settled. “The business with Sakhalin was inexcusable,” she said in a voice made low by fury. “But to refuse me the journey to the coast to meet Charles—!” She broke off.
    Nadine watched for a few moments the interesting spectacle of Tess Soerensen too angry to speak. Then she lifted a hand to signal the jahar forward at a walk. Rather than looking at Tess, Nadine examined the timbered palisade that surrounded Basille, noting its gaps and its open gates and the sudden blur of activity at the gates when the approach of two hundred horsemen was noted by its guards.
    “He’s afraid,” she said softly. Tess did not reply. Perhaps she had not heard her. Perhaps she did not—or could not—understand what Nadine knew to be true. “Off the fields!” she shouted at two idiot stragglers, and she led them along a dirt track that wound in toward town.
    Out in the fields, workers breaking the ground in preparation for the spring ploughing raised their caps to stare, while others scattered back across the furrowed earth to find safety in hovels and behind low carts. A string of watchers appeared on what still remained of the palisade of Basille.
    Nadine regarded these signs pensively. “Poor things.