Gansukh backed away, his hands held in front of him. “My Khan, I’m—” he started, but he was cut short by a tremendous wail that came howling out of ?gedei. He watched, startled, as the Khagan tore an ornamental cap off the balcony railing and hurled it into the night. When the Khagan whirled on him, Gansukh retreated quickly, but the Khagan’s interest only lay in the furniture and vases in the sitting room.
Gansukh continued to retreat toward the door, stunned by the transformation that had come over ?gedei Khan. He was no longer the leader of the Mongol Empire; he had become a gigantic infant, throwing a horrific temper tantrum. He threw vases across the room. He picked up furniture and dashed it against the floor, and when he couldn’t pick it up easily, he kicked and hit it. All the while, his body shook with great wracking sobs.
The door opened, and Gansukh, filled with both shame and revulsion, slipped out of the room. The guards closed the door and stood in front of it, their eyes forward, their postures saying quite plainly that they would never acknowledge any of the sounds coming through the portal. What happened behind them was a secret they would never reveal.
Gansukh’s hand slipped inside his deel, touching the tiny lacquered secret held therein. ?gedei’s voice chased him as he walked away from the Khagan’s private room, an echo that grew louder and louder in his head as the real sounds grew fainter: None of you understand what is truly important.
CHAPTER 20:
THE DEATH OF A FRIEND
A messenger does not kill; a Binder does not take life. But there was blood on her hands and on the knife.
“Do you need help?”
Cnán heard Raphael’s voice distantly, and for a moment she thought he was asking the question of her, but when she raised her head to reply, she saw he was speaking to Percival.
“I raised him from a foal,” Percival said. His face was a mask; his lips barely moved as he spoke. “I will do it alone. Help the others see to Taran.” The solemn knight turned and walked into the woods, following a trail of blood and crushed grass.
The silence of the field and forest closed around Cnán. Her knife still dripped blood into the hoof-trodden dirt and grass. She stared, seeing but not seeing the trees at the edge of the woods in their strangely placid beauty. Yasper’s lingering smoke rendered the sight eerie and ghostlike. The dagger in her hands felt light as air, and that seemed wrong. She wanted to be rid of it, but at the same time couldn’t make herself throw it away.
They had wrapped Taran in a cloak and taken him back to camp, where a grave would be dug. The Dutchman wandered the field, dousing the flames, and about him the remaining smoke wreathed and whirled. She stepped over the corpse of a Mongol, facedown in the dirt, the body positioned just as Taran’s had been. She suppressed a shudder and moved on, feeling as though she would be violently ill.
How far had she fallen, to permit herself to arrive here and to use this tool, a killing tool, as it was meant to be used? She wiped the blade clean with a clutch of dried leaves, shock wearing away slowly, like feeling coming back into a sleeping limb and, with it, the first prickles of returning conscience.
Not what she wanted to feel.
She took another step, planning to get away from the company and be by herself. Her feet took over. As she walked, she heard arguments behind her: Roger’s raised voice, Feronantus’s reply. The words were empty and distant, intrusions into an awful dream. Was this the penance for what she had done?
A strange, sad sound reached her, seeped into her mind, and pulled her along the direction in which she walked. Tall weeds brushed against her legs. She stopped at the edge of the wide open stretch through which Mongols had rushed only a short time ago, and her focus returned with a sickening lurch as she realized that she had not been wandering aimlessly, but following another’s footsteps across the field and back toward the woods.
Cnán stood still, watching as Percival knelt by his mount. Obeying some instinct that had told it to seek refuge, the horse had staggered into the shelter of the trees and then collapsed.
The knight’s frame caught the rays of sun falling through the canopy of high trees, mail over muscle moving with a deliberate, gentle softness so utterly at odds with his violent motion before. Cnán heard again the husking, ragged sound that had pulled her from her malaise—deep whimpers from Percival’s mortally wounded destrier.
His own breath seemed to blend with the slow panting of the large horse where it lay amidst the ferns.
Her stomach clenched, and a lump formed in her throat as he removed a mailed glove and ran a callused hand over the animal’s thick neck. A shaft jutted from the animal’s flank. The horse gave a louder moan, and its chest heaved. Percival stood back a few steps as it thrashed and then twisted in agony.