The Bandit King by Lilith Saintcrow Page B

standard. No surprises. Guards and challenge-patterns, the Damarsene leaving their tents to see this tiny group come to treat with them, a murmur running through their ranks.
    Vianne’s head lifted. She looked about with interest, hopefully noting the mangonels, the machines capable of flinging the Graecan fire. The vats of bubbling tarry stuff the fire would be made from, each with a hedgewitch or a Damarsene sorcerer—they, as the Pruzians, call them
Hekzmeizten
—standing watchful, to make certain it did not overheat and explode, doing the enemy’s work. I saw only a flash of her chin, a slice of her cheek.
    If they surround us, the only hope is to kill a few and drag her onto Arran’s back. The Pruzian may hold some of them, but di Narborre was his client—or his client’s lundsman—to begin with. Adersahl is a canny Court sorcerer, but against so many…
Sickness took me by surprise, a wedge of bile rising to my throat.
    The mince pies were sitting
most
uncomfortably. And the thought of Vianne before me in the saddle, as she had ridden through half of Arquitaine during our escape, did not help.
    The commander’s tent was a monstrosity of dark fabric, dust and smoke hazing its sides. It flew the new device of d’Orlaans—the crowned serpent over a rising sun. The swan of the Tirecian-Trimestin family, being his murdered brother’s sign, perhaps gave him an uneasy conscience.
    You know better. The man has no conscience. Be ready to exercise a similar lack.
    The stamped-down space in front of the commander’s tent was a strategic nightmare. It would take so little to make Vianne a prisoner, and then I would be faced with terrible choices.
    Calm, Tristan. Watch. Wait, and plan.
    It was Adersahl who lifted her down from the saddle, and though his hands did not linger at her waist a bolt of something hot and nasty speared me. Twas not the mince pies.
    Van Harkke took her horse, murmured something to her. Another laugh, this one truly amused, from her throat as I dismounted, not liking to leave Arran behind but unwilling to let Vianne wander farther alone.
    There was no party to meet us at the entrance to the tent—an insult, to be sure. Vianne did not seem to mind. She took a deep breath, shoulders squaring, and glanced once more at the Pruzian Knife.
    He nodded slightly, and she looked to Adersahl next. He nodded as well, the crimson feather in his cap waving finely.
    I waited for her gaze, but it did not turn to me. Instead, she arranged her skirts and stalked for the tent. The song of the Aryx rose, its melody developing a counterpoint, and familiar fire raced along my nerves. I did not wonder at it—the Aryx is the fount of Court sorcery and a mark of the ruler’s legitimacy.
    And also, twas
her
. I would be dead not to feel that pull. It is the Moon’s longing for the Sun, chased across the sky night and day. Or the aching of a lock for a key, a gittern for the hand that makes it sing.
    How could she think I meant
her
harm?
    Smoke threaded up. The folds of hanging fabric before my Queen suddenly crawled with silvery witchflame, lapping tongues of it devouring the entrance-flaps. They ate the material in a spreading pattern, and by the time she reached the hole in the tent wall it was large enough for her to simply pass through, her head down and her hood pulled so close none of the falling ash would foul her.
    As entrances go, twas a dramatic one.
    Adersahl was slightly behind her, and I was at her heels. The Court-sorcery flames died, smelling of cinna and clovis. She pushed her hood back, and the men at the map-table all leapt to their feet.
    I knew the d’Arquitaine among them, noblemen and d’Orlaans’s creatures all. Simeon di Noreu, di Narborre’s foppish little puppy, with his blond curls and his curled lip; portly dark Firin di Vantcris with his hand at his swordhilt, a duelist fond of cheating. Tathis d’Anselmethe, the pointed beard he affected dyed coal-black, a nobleman who stooped to