Her son showed his teeth like a dog. “What sort of name is that? A stonedweller name? But it does not matter, for it is not mine. I am Unver, and Unver I will remain.”
“But your father was a prince!”
“My father left us for another woman before he died—you told me so all those years ago! And where is my sister, Derra? What did you do with her, marry her to one of those smirking brutes outside?”
Old Fikolmij suddenly seemed to understand what was happening. His eyes went wide, and his nearly toothless mouth gaped in a grin of delight. “By the Thunderer, is this the wretched stonedweller’s son? Is this Prince Josua’s bastard come back?” He laughed, an explosion of surprised amusement that turned into a deep cough.
“Where is my sister?” Unver demanded.
“She is gone, Deornoth, my son.” Vorzheva’s usually guarded expression was so naked, so raw that Hyara could barely stand to look at her. “She ran away from the family that took her. Twenty years ago, and I have mourned for her every day, as I mourned for you.” She lifted a hand toward Unver, but he backed away. “No, do not blame me! When your father left us, I tried to take you away to a safe place, but the grasslands were at war and we were captured—”
“Vorzheva, you cannot speak of this now,” Hyara said. “Gurdig will be back any moment. I can hear them shouting for him out by the paddocks. If this truly is your son, he must go before my husband gets here.”
“Run away?” Unver gave her a brief look of contempt. “After being cast out like a lame colt or a sickly hound? No. I will stay until I have answers.” He turned back to Vorzheva. “Where is my father? Why did he leave us?”
“Because he was a coward,” Fikolmij wheezed from his bed. “He was always a coward. And he made your mother his whore.”
Vorzheva grabbed a cup from a shelf beside her and threw it at him. It sailed wide and smashed against the wall. Fikolmij laughed, as pleased with chaos as a demented child.
“Shut your mouth!” Vorzheva screamed at the old man. “You tried to drive us apart from the beginning.” She turned back to Unver. “She lured him away. That Perdruinese witch Faiera, that Scrollbearer, she stole your father from us. He left to go to her and never came back. And his noble friends did nothing to help us.” Vorzheva looked around wildly for a moment, then hurried across the wagon to a chest piled with blankets. As Unver and the rest watched, she threw the blankets onto the floor and opened the heavy chest, sinews straining in her bony arms, then lifted something long and black from inside. It was a scabbard, and as the rest of it came into view Hyara recognized it—Vorzheva’s husband’s sword, a slender weapon even for the blades of city folk.
“Here!” Vorzheva cried. “Here is his sword! Tell me Josua was not bespelled by that Perdruinese she-demon! Otherwise, why would he go away and leave this behind? This is the blade he used to kill Utvart and win me!”
The tumult outside was growing very loud; Hyara could hear many people shouting. She had time only to say, “I warned you—it is Gurdig—!” before the door of the wagon was yanked open so powerfully that one of the hinges snapped. A tall, wide figure shouldered its way through, and for a moment the darkening skies behind and the flames from the wagon’s cookfire made it seem a kind of demon.
Not so far from the truth, thought Hyara, her stomach like a cold stone.
“Where is this stranger?” her husband bellowed but did not wait for anyone to answer his question. Gurdig crossed the wagon so quickly that Unver scarcely had time to raise his arms before the thane hit him with the back of his fist hard enough to knock him sprawling into the crockery chest, which overturned. The lid flew open and bowls and cups tumbled out onto the wagon’s floor, but even as Unver struggled to find his footing, Gurdig, who must have outweighed him by a hundredweight, caught hold of his tunic and yanked him to his feet, then threw him out through the open front door of the wagon and sprang out after him.
“Kill him, Gurdig!” shouted old Fikolmij, wheezing with delight as he struggled to get out of his bed, something he had not done in many moons. “Yes! Kill the stonedweller’s whelp!”
“One thing I swear,” said Vorzheva, her voice gone icy cold. “Whatever happens, you will not be there to gloat, old man.” And even as Hyara watched in astonishment, her elder sister snatched the first thing that came to her hand, a long meat fork, and jabbed it into Fikolmij’s wattled neck. The old man shrieked, his eyes rolling like a panicked cow’s, but even as he thrashed in the tangling blanket, his long, straggling beard slowly turned red on one side, Vorzheva picked up another object, a great carving knife, and set the point of it against his nightshirt, between his ribs. “I promised myself this day,” she said, leaning close to the old man’s terrified face, then shoved the blade into him until it would go no farther. Fikolmij’s shrieks turned into gurgles. For a moment he waved his hands to no purpose, like an infant unable to control its limbs, then he slumped sideways in his bed in a widening red stain.
Hyara fled the wagon as if demons were after her.
At first, because of the deepening twilight, she could barely make out what was happening outside the wagon. Perhaps half a dozen men had dragged Unver to the ground, with Gurdig leaning over them like a bear trying to pick fish from a river. Dozens more had crowded into the camp and surrounded the combatants, shouting and cursing in excitement. Crows, startled from their nearby nesting tree by the noise, wheeled above the mêlée in their hundreds like a squawking thundercloud.
By sheer weight of numbers the Stallion clansmen had overwhelmed the stranger, kicking and pummeling him, shouting as they did so, some of them laughing as though it were only a rough game. Hyara suddenly wished she could set all of them on fire—the brutish clansmen, her husband, the wagon and the entire camp—then fly away like a bird.
“Off him!” Gurdig bellowed. “Off him, you shit-eaters! He is mine!”
Her husband was a very large man with a terrible temper, as Hyara and the clansmen knew well; the men swiftly untangled themselves from Unver and rolled away. The last pair dragged the stranger to his feet and pushed him staggering toward Gurdig, who felled him with a single blow of his thick fist.
“How do you dare to push your way into the March-thane’s wagon?” Gurdig said, standing over him. “What clan do you come from?”
Unver looked up at him, his eyes still bright in a mask of blood and dirt. “I have no clan. I came for what is mine.”
One of Gurdig’s followers handed him a long, curved sword. “Then die nameless,” the thane said, and spat on the ground. Gurdig turned to the men who had now formed a rough circle around the two of them. “Someone give him a blade so that I will have at least a hoof-paring’s less shame when I kill him.”
Hyara felt someone shoulder past her, almost tumbling her off the wagon’s shallow front step. It was Vorzheva, who threw something toward Unver. It struck, pommel first, and fell flat on the ground—a long, thin, straight sword. A stonedweller sword.
“Take it!” Vorzheva cried. “Your father called it ‘Naidel’.”
“He named his sword a needle?” Gurdig threw back his head and laughed, the twin braids of his beard bouncing on his chest. “Good! Very good! To call a man’s weapon, especially such a puny one, after a woman’s tool.”
Unver looked down at the sword, blood dripping from his chin, but he did not pick it up. “I want nothing of his.”
Thane Gurdig laughed again. “Then I shall give you something of mine!” he said, and leaped forward, swinging his great sword in a horizontal arc meant to decapitate the other man with one stroke. Unver rolled out of the way and let Gurdig’s momentum carry him past, but it was a near thing.
The March-thane turned. His smile was wolfish. “I see there is some fight left in you. That is good, by the Grass Thunderer! I will have some evening entertainment after all!” He moved toward him, this time in a more controlled way, swiping this way and that, making Unver creep backward toward the fire pit.
“Watch out for the fire!” Vorzheva cried.
“Wife!” shouted Gurdig. “Tell your sister to keep her mouth shut or I will shut it well and truly when I finish with this horse-stealer.”
For the first time, Unver’s face showed something other than disgust and resignation. “I am no thief. I came only for what is mine.”