When news of her father’s death reached the Principate of Kuhmbuhluhn and Giliahna broached her decision to journey to the duchy of her birth, possibly to not return to Kuhmbuhluhn, Gy and all the councilors tried mightily to dissuade her, but she was adamant and spoke to them in terms they could both comprehend and appreciate as the Middle Kingdoms noblemen they basically were, for all their principate’s nominal Confederation allegiance.
“My Lord Gy, gentlemen, I must go back to Sanderz-Vawn on a matter of personal honor and of the honor of my house. A great injustice was done to me and my brother in years agone, and if he be unable or unwilling to go back, then it be my bounden duty to redress that wrong in the blood of those who perpetrated it. Your generous offers of lands and wealth make me feel truly humble in the light of the obvious love for me which impelled them, and please believe that the love I feel for Kuhmbuhluhn and for you all is no less in quantity or quality. But, noble gentlemen that you all are, you must recognize that satisfaction of this, my debt of honor, must come before other considerations.”
The men grouped around the table nodded, one and all— in their minds blood debts took precedence over all else.
Old Archduke Rohluhn scratched at his skimpy white hair. “How many troops will my lady require? And can she estimate for how long the service?”
Before she could answer, Gy snapped, “Stop quibbling, uncle! Our lady is a Princess of Kuhmbuhluhn. She shall have at least one squadron of our horseguards—say, three hundred full-strength lances. And I’ll command them; this business will be settled in short order, I trow!”
Giliahna repressed any trace of her mirth at his still-boyish enthusiasm, saying rather, “Lord prince, as you know, the High Lords permit organized bands of Freefighters to enter and leave the Confederation at will; but what do you think their reaction and that of the Prince of Karaleenos, in whose domains my home duchy lies, would be to an incursion of nearly one thousand household troops of Kuhmbuhluhn led by the reigning prince, himself?”
The aged archduke and several other veteran councilors nodded, and Duke Djaikuhb of Rahbzburk said, “My lady is right, my prince. Before you’d got five leagues south of the border, you’d find yourself boxed in by Confederation dragoons. They’d politely ask your business, then they’d politely point out the decrees of the High Lords forbidding the maintenance or the movements of private armies save on the frontiers, then they’d politely escort you and your lances back to Kuhmbuhluhn and, in a month or so, a messenger would arrive from Kehnooryos Atheenahs with a politely couched reprimand.”
And so, Giliahna left Kuhmbuhluhnburk with only a dozen horseguards and her immediate retainers, conveyed in two coaches and three wagons. Upon hearing that mere was a rumor that Duke Hwahltuh of Sanderz-Vawn had died of slow poisoning, Gy would not rest his entreaties until Giliahna agreed to include in her party a Zahrtohgah physician, one Master Fahreed, and his apprentice, Raheen.
The prince and a large cavalcade accompanied the dowager princess as far as the border, and, during their last, solitary conversation, Gy took both her hands and looked down into her eyes. “My lady, you asked weeks agone if I loved any woman and I answered nay, but that is not true. I do love a woman. I love
you
and, did our laws not forbid such, you would be
my
wife,
my
princess—after all, I am less than five years your junior. But such can never be and I know it. Therefore, I charge you this: Send to me a sweet, loving maid like yourself, one who can come to love and comfort me as you loved and so comforted my dear father, and I vow to cherish her as I would have cherished you.”
Ahrkeethoheeks Bili
of Morguhn had been as gracious and caring a host as she recalled from her childhood visits to the Hall of the Red Eagle, and such had been the attentions lavished upon her by his handsome eldest son, Djef Morguhn, that she had felt almost embarrassed, before her acutely perceptive half brother noted her discomfiture and found a convenient errand for his heir to ride forth upon. He then proved a veritable fount of information, all of which she found interesting, but it was not until they were closeted alone together within his grim little office at Morguhn Hall that he imparted the news which set her heart to pounding and raised tingling goose flesh on her body from head to toe.
“At our last meeting before his… shall we say, untimely death, I promised your late sire that, when he died, I would .dispatch word to your brother, Tim. You should know that he and I have kept in touch over these last years and that, through me—though Tim doesn’t know it—your late father’s I gold reached him.
“Please listen to what I say and believe it, Giliahna. Your father deeply regretted his hasty and ill-advised actions in sending you and Tim away, but by the time he recovered fully from whatever drugs those harpies—your stepmother and her damned tongue-sister—were dosing him with, the deed was irrevocably done. You were wedded and Tim, stubborn in his hurt and rage, refused to respond to what few letters Hwahltuh could sneak past those Ehleenee and out of his hall. For, understand you, Giliahna, your poor, ailing father was very close to a prisoner in his own duchy in his last years, spied upon when he was not actively guarded by his wife and her slut, his half-Ehleen brood and their adherents.
“Giliahna, your father was born in a Horseclans yurt and was past middle age when he led his clan from the Sea of Grass. Your Horseclansman, fresh from the west, has an inordinate love for children, any children, but especially his own. You’d have to fully comprehend that fact to be aware of just how deeply your father hurt himself ten years ago. He was a proud man and strong, with more real guts than a whole tribe of mountain barbarians, yet many’s the time he has sat in that same chair and wept like a whipped child in his regret over banishing you and Tim.
“Had he chosen to cleave to that thrice-damned perversion of a religion upon which Mehleena so dotes, he might have at least had the idiotic precepts of that faithless faith to console himself with. But Horseclansmen do not harbor this idiotic fear of interbreeding that the Ehleenee do; indeed, there is no such word as
ahimomikseeah
in all the Mehrikan dialects, though the High Lord Milo tells me that there was once such a word, centuries ago.
“But, be that as it may, your father is gone to Wind, along with his sorrow. You are returned, and Tim soon will be.”
Giliahna clasped her hands tightly to keep them from trembling. In a painfully tight voice, she asked, “When, brother, oh when?”
The archduke smiled at what his uncommonly powerful mind could read in hers. “Two weeks, little sister, possibly three, depending upon road conditions. He’ll be bringing the Ruby Company, his condotta, down here with him. One of my men will make contact with him ere he crosses into Kehnooryos Ehlahs, delivering to him a pass from High Lord Milo countersigned by our own Prince Zenos. Once he’s here, of course, there’ll be no question about private troops, since Vawn is still considered a frontier duchy in some senses.”
He paused to drain his cup and refill both his and hers. “But I tell you all this in strictest confidence, sister. Be damned careful which if any of your retainers you tell, and be certain that you breathe not a word of it once you are at Vawn, to
anyone
, mind you. Your brother, Ahl, already knows, but don’t even discuss it with him, either aloud or by mindspeak, for Tim has plans for Mehleena, her litter and her folk and’t’were better that they not be forewarned.”
Giliahna sipped her wine, “What sort of plans, Brother Bili?”
Bili cracked his big knuckles all at once. “I’m sure he’ll confide them to you when arrive he does. But I don’t know any details, nor do I wish to know them, lest I forget my duty to my overlord, Prince Zenos, who
is
Mehleena’s cousin.”
Geros had told him where to find her. In the wide corridor outside that room which, long ago, had so often been their place of love, he enjoined Sergeant Rai. “Draw you up that chair, old friend. Allow no one to pass into these chambers without my leave.”
In the sitting room, he surprised a small, delicate-looking Zahrtohgan girl brewing a spicy tea, the exciting fragrance of which filled the chamber. “My lord,” she began, “my lady is not yet arisen and she…” Then a tiny, brown-skinned hand flew to her dark lips and her soft brown eyes widened perceptibly. Smiling secretively, she shyly inquired, “You, then… my lord is my lady’s brother? The Duke Tim?”
At his nod, the girl’s smile widened, despite the tears coursing copiously down her dusky cheeks. “Oh… oh, my lord, oh, oh, my lady… so very happy she will be…”
Giliahna half-heard the chamber door open and half-knew that she should at least sit up and greet the sweet, faithful Widahd, but the other half of her was lost in erotically pleasant reveries of lying here, upon this very bed with Tim… so very long ago. Almost could she still feel his sweet lips pressing upon her own, almost feel his hands upon her shoulders, almost… The lips had withdrawn, but there was still a warm hand upon her shoulder, and so reluctantly, she opened her eyes.
“Mother, dear?” Ahl’s voice contained a larger than usual note of mockery and he fixed his blind eyes directly upon his stepmother.
Mehleena squirmed inwardly and her rage rose in proportion. She could not bear it when Ahl skewered her with those sightless eyes that seemed to be staring directly into her very soul. But before her rage could burst out in words, he had continued.
“Mother, dear, it were best that you have one of the carpenters reinforce another chair if you intend to dine with the rest of the family
in
future. In their present condition, I fear, any one of the less massive chairs would splinter under your lard-sow weight.” The blind man smiled broadly and Lady ‘ Mairee chuckled throatily, adding unneeded fuel to stoke the fires of Mehleena’s boiling anger.
But such was the fat woman’s ire that no words would come, only screams, hisses and stuttering. Ahl and Lady Mairee observed her briefly, then the tall man arose, extending his arm to the tiny young woman. “My lady, it is time we departed. This will be a very full day, I feel it.”
To his sorrow, Myron, too, arose at that moment. With all the force of her rage, Mehleena spun on her broad rump and sank her fist into his midsection, the pointy little knuckles penetrating the vee below the ribs, driving the air from his lungs and his just-eaten breakfast up into his throat.
While the unhappy young man gasped and choked, dribbling gobbets of chewed food and turning purple, Ahl never lost his sardonic smile. Shaking his head slowly, he said, “My, such fierce maternal affection. Wind be thanked that our dear mother does not treat
me
to her love taps. Little bumboy, you had best whack your lover on the back a few times, he appears to be strangling.” Then, both of them chuckling, he and his lady made their slow, stately way down the length of the dining chamber and out of sight, leaving Ahl’s stepbrother in his suffering and Ahl’s stepmother still hissing and spluttering in her impotent rage.
The White Hawk coverlet had long since been kicked off the foot of the bed onto the floor, but not because of the fire on the hearth. The heat of two long-suppressed passions, finally commingled, had rendered the room hot as a smithy for a while. Now the evaporation of their love sweat was cooling them and Giliahna had straightened a wadded linen sheet enough to cover their wet bodies.
Raising herself on one elbow, she looked down upon the face of Tim, her brother, her first lover, now once more returned to her. “I never stopped loving him,” she thought. “Yes, I loved Djylz, too, but… but it was a different kind of love; Djylz was my husband, my dearest friend, my companion, but he was never”—her brow wrinkled in concentration—”was never
part of me
, was never and could never have been what Tim is to me. It is as if all those long years something was gone, something was missing, I was but a shell of myself. And now, Tim has refilled that shell, has made me again complete. Oh, Tim, Tim, my dear dear brother; Sun and Wind, how I love you!”
“And I you, my sister.” Thinking him sleeping, her thought had been unshielded and then, suddenly, Tim’s mind was there within hers, but not as intruder… never as intruder.
“You have changed, Giliahna. The body I cherished in my memory those ten long years was that of a slender, tender, nubile young girl.”
“Ob, Tim, Tim…” She pictured herself as she was reflected in the long mirror of her robing room—the flat muscles of shoulders, arms and legs well developed from years of riding, hunting, archery and, more recently, from fierce bouts of mock swordplay with her princely stepson, Gy; the flare of her hips beneath the narrowness of her waist, the waist, itself, made to seem smaller than truth by the flared hips and by the breasts above; no, her breasts were most certainly no longer those of a young girl, being full and firm and proudly out-thrusting, the dark-blue lines of veins meandering under the fair skin, the nipples small but prominent in their shade of fiery red-pink. “Do I? Does this body of mine, then, so displease you?”
His warm, sweet mind embraced her more fully than mere arms ever could. “Displease me, my sister? How ever could you displease me, you, who are a part of me? Ten years have passed and I am a man; for nine of those years—until word reached me of the death of the prince, your husband—I thought you lost to me forever, thought that I must then live out the rest of my years in the knowledge that the most important part of me was missing. Yes, I took other maids and women, even kept and maintained several for varying lengths of time, for I am a man with hungers that mere soul-sickness cannot erase.”
Her mindspeak was gentle, hesitant. “Did you… love any of these, your women, Tim?”
“I suppose that I did… in a way. At least, I felt some emotion for a few, some attachment that I thought was love. But I never did, nor could I ever, feel for another as for you. As mere children, we forged together a truly singular relationship. It has passed through fires of hate and fires of war and been bathed in oceans of tears—yours, mine, and poor, used, victimized father’s—but still its temper rings true.”