Brothers of the Wind Read online

  “As I feared,” said Hakatri when I told him, “he has left Asu’a. May the Garden forgive his foolish pride!”

  “Perhaps he is just out riding,” Tariki ventured. He was called Clearsight, and indeed he had eyes as sharp as a soaring hawk. But he also saw only the best in those around him, which is why he was one of my master’s closest companions while not his most trustworthy counselor. “Ineluki often does that when he is unhappy with your parents.”

  “Taking his armor and his hunting spear?” Hakatri shook his head. “I spoke to the stable guards before I met you. He has gone and told no one of his plans. What do you think that sounds like?”

  Ineluki’s armiger Yohe trotted up, hair unbraided and eyes wide. “Is my lord with you?” she asked my master. “I cannot find him anywhere.”

  “He seems to have taken Bronze and rode out by himself before sunrise,” Hakatri said. “Hurry to the gate and ask the watch there if they saw him. Then go to my lady Nidreyu, his heart-friend, and learn if he said anything to her that would explain his absence.”

  Yohe turned and hurried out.

  “He would not . . . he would not go after the worm alone, would he?” I asked.

  “If he feels his bravery has been mocked? I do not doubt it.” I could see the deep unease beneath Hakatri’s irritation. He did not always show it, but he loved his brother fiercely. He sent me then to the Visitor’s Court to discover whether the mortal men were still there, and if they had heard anything from Ineluki.

  I hastened across the palace, through the Court of Fowls, the Dancing Pavilion, and the lingering night-shadows of the Smoke Gardens, coming at last and out of breath to the Visitor’s Court. I found no evidence of Ineluki there, and the mortals themselves were still asleep. The one called Cormach returned with the guard I sent to them, his face flushed with either worry or embarrassment—at the time I knew little of mortals and could not recognize the difference. “I swear we know nothing of this, my lord,” he told me. “We were told to wait until your monarchs have decided whether to help us or not.”

  “I am no lord,” I said. “And neither are Iyu’unigato and Amerasu our monarchs. They are our wisest elders, deep with foresight and lore.” But even those wise elders, it seemed, had not foreseen Ineluki’s sudden departure. “In any case, I apologize for disturbing your peace.”

  “But is there something we can do to help? Our horses are rested. We could help you search for him.”

  I almost smiled at the thought of mortals and mortal-raised horses being able to run down one of the Brothers of the Wind. “You are kind, but my master has enough help. Wait for your audience. May fate smile on you.”

  When I returned to the stables, I was dismayed to find that Yohe’s search had also been fruitless, that Lady Nidreyu had not seen Ineluki since the previous day. Lord Hakatri, knowing his brother had a running start, had already set the grooms to preparing both of his horses. It made me superstitiously uncomfortable to see someone else do the work that was mine to oversee, but I understood my master’s haste.

  “Armiger Pamon,” he told me as he donned his witchwood armor, “you will ride Frostmane. I will need fleet Seafoam if I am to catch my brother.” The rest of my master’s companions had arrived and were getting ready to set out. They already seemed to know that their giant-hunting trip had been eclipsed by something more important and even more perilous: their faces were grim, and I heard none of the banter that usually accompanied preparations for a hunt.

  At last, as the first rays of dawn began to brighten the sky, we set out, with me riding Hakatri’s powerful charger Frostmane. I did not expect to keep up with my master and his friends, since what Hakatri wanted most was to catch his brother. My master and the rest of his hunting companions did indeed set out at a blazing pace, and soon left the rest of us far behind. The other squires, all young Zida’ya, lesser scions of Year-Dancing House, must have heard something of the unusual nature of the day’s chase from Yohe. They did not speak to me about it—the other armigers spoke to me only sparingly at the best of times, and were it not for my master’s exalted status, I doubt they would have acknowledged my existence at all. But I saw them murmuring among themselves and their gestures were full of confusion and concern even as Hakatri and his comrades sped away from us along the shore of Landfall Bay, galloping toward the Westmarch Road.

  * * *

  • • •

  I know there are some, even among those in my master’s family, who believe that the favor Hakatri showed me was merely a bid for attention in a court that loves the new and the unusual. It is true that I was of the Tinukeda’ya race and that my father, Pamon Sur, was a mere groom, although even the Zida’ya had to admit my sire had a skill with horses that no one of the Year-Dancing Clan could match. Long before I was born he had achieved a good name among the masters of the Homeward City. But I swear it is also true that it was my own diligence, as well as the aptitudes I had from my father’s bloodline, that led to Hakatri noticing me toiling in the stables as a child. He said many times that when I first caught his eye, he did not know I was the son of Pamon Sur, but only admired my hard work and my calm way with the horses. My master was never known to lie—and why would he, in any case, about such a small thing? I was far from the only young Tinukeda’ya working in the stables in those days. That is what my people do: we make ourselves useful to the Zida’ya. Whether we sail the ships of our masters or build their houses or take care of their children, we Ocean Children do what we are given to do and do it well.

  What is beyond doubt is that Hakatri did notice me. When he saw that I had my father’s skill with animals he made me his personal groom, and when he was disappointed by the young Zida’ya offered to him for training as armigers he decided to do a strange and unprecedented thing in choosing me—the first among my kind—to become his squire and right hand. Soon I was not merely tending his horses but accompanying him on his hunts and other journeys. I learned to take care of his weapons and more than a little of how to use them as well, though Lord Hakatri’s own friends mocked him for having a changeling armiger and made it clear in more subtle ways that they did not think much of me or my kind.

  “Do not heed them, Pamon,” he always told me. “The good name you will gain will far outlast even the cruelest jests.”

  I was not certain even then that he was right, but I know Lord Hakatri believed it, so I tried to believe it too. I tell it now as a mark of how my master thought and how honorably he treated me. Indeed, in many ways he was kinder to me than my own father had been, who had little patience with anyone less painstaking and single-minded than he was. My father made me diligent. My lord Hakatri made me believe I could be something more than just my father’s son.

  As I grew, I learned the skills of war and conflict, taught both by Hakatri himself and other instructors of Year-Dancing House. I practiced these lessons beside many young Zida’ya nobles, some also training to be armigers, some to become lords-errant in their own right. For a time my lord’s younger brother Ineluki trained with us too, and for the first time in my life I felt myself to be almost an equal of the Zida’ya themselves. It was a heady feeling, and also a perilous one, because it soon became clear to me in whispers and glances from my fellow students that many of them did not like to see one of the Tinukeda’ya risen so far above the usual limits on my kind.

  Soon enough, though, I realized I would never be much of a warrior. I had a long reach and was quick to learn that which required thought and understanding, but I was not as fast, nimble, or strong as any of the young Zida’ya lords. Still, I worked hard to master the glaive and the swiftsword as best I could, and to learn the Warrior’s Way, so that I might at least watch my master with the eye of experience. And though the young lords of Year-Dancing had previously resented my presence, when it became clear I would never threaten their prowess as warriors they softened a little toward me. They never made me feel like one of them
, but they at least came to accept my presence, although much of that was due, I think, to the high esteem in which my master was held.

  It was true then, and still is, that Lord Hakatri, eldest son of Asu’a’s Protector and Sa’onsera, was held in great esteem not just by me, but by all his people. Even the young lords-errant of his generation who sought to rival him could not help but admire him, and that is no surprise, because he was altogether admirable. I never heard my master tell a lie or even consider it—in this he was truly his mother’s child—and I never saw him turn his back upon anyone who needed his help. His younger brother often scolded him for this, since Ineluki perceived it as a weakness. “If you are a friend to all,” he would say, “then you are no better a friend to those closest to you than to those you barely know.”

  But Hakatri would only shake his head at these complaints. “And if I decided whom to help simply by their closeness in blood or friendship, I would not be a lord-errant at all but a paymaster, tallying up the figures before deciding how much assistance to give to others.”

  In those days of general peace among the tribes of the Lost Garden, no role was prized more highly among the young Zida’ya nobles than that of lord-errant, which meant one who used his good name, good sense, and skill to help those who were in need, whether they be farmers beset by giants or settlements plagued by banditry. My master was so well known that even mortals came to Asu’a from leagues and leagues away to ask his help. Ineluki once spoke to me of it, and it was hard to tell whether he found it more amusing or infuriating.

  “Your master is like a god to the mortals,” he told me. “They leave offerings for him at the gates of Asu’a as if it were one of their shrines.”

  “He has helped many of them, my lord,” I pointed out.

  Ineluki gave me a long look that I did not entirely understand. “Yes,” he said at last. “And his fondness for strays will cost him someday, I fear, though I pray that I am wrong.”

  Such a strange pair, my master and his brother. Hakatri was dark and tall, solid as a standing stone, cheerful and talkative when the mood was on him, but more often quiet and thoughtful, even when others were at their most carefree. Ineluki was almost as tall as his elder brother but far more slender, and all the Zida’ya agreed that he had the fairer face. Where Hakatri preferred to read or talk with a friend or two, Ineluki loved to be in a crowd, jesting and singing. But just as the younger brother’s good humor could set a room alight, so when he was angry could he empty a festive gathering in a short time. From the hour of his birth, it has been said, Ineluki burned more brightly—and with greater heat—than any of his people.

  But despite these differences, the love between the brothers was deep and strong. They fought sometimes as brothers do, of course, especially because Ineluki felt that his elder brother often treated him more like a child than an equal, giving him advice and holding him back from one rash urge or another. Still, in most ways they seemed almost like a single soul with two bodies, and it was rare to see one without finding the other somewhere close by.

  * * *

  • • •

  Hakatri and his hunting party had soon left the rest of us far, far behind. We were following a much-traveled road, and because it was not easy to know whether our masters might have turned to follow a sideways track, the other armigers and I proceeded at a very deliberate pace through the steep, forested hills of the Protector’s Chase. After many hours of riding, we came down onto the Westmarch Road and made our way across the ford at the Little Redwash River. We did not stop with nightfall—the Zida’ya can ride for days without sleeping—and it was all I could do to remain safely in the saddle until dawn at last lit the eastern skies.

  Toward midday we crossed the bridge over Great Redwash itself and descended into Kestrel Gap, the flatlands between the river and the Whitewake Heights, the hill country south of the Sunstep Mountains. The Zida’ya may seldom need sleep, but their mounts need to rest and eat, even the astonishingly hardy horses of the Asu’a stables. We rode until the stars were bright in the sky, then stopped to feed and water our mounts. After tending to Frostmane, I gratefully stole a few hours of sleep. Two days had passed, and we still had seen no sign of Hakatri and his comrades.

  The land around us on the third day was unexceptionable and largely flat as we crossed Kestrel Gap, but the meadows were alive with cowslip, bluebell, and red campion. Again we rode well past the fall of darkness, but near midnight we reached the Silver Way in the marshy lands along the outer edge of the fells, and it became too dangerous to ride even for my sharp-sighted fellow armigers. We stopped and built a fire. Large, fierce wolves roamed the Kestrel Gap in those days, and it had been a long, hungry winter in those mostly empty lands, so even the Zida’ya were not disposed to be careless.

  As the stars of Lu’yasa’s Staff rose into the southwestern sky the other armigers sat around the fire and sang songs of the Garden. I found it a little strange not that they should know so much about those vanished lands none of us had ever seen, but that I should know so little, since both our peoples called it the land of their birth.

  “You never sing, Pamon,” Yohe said to me that night. It was one of the first times she had spoken to me since we had left Asu’a. “Do your kind never honor the Lost Home?”

  “Do not despise my silence—I would honor it if I knew how,” I told her. “But the songs you sing were never taught to me.”

  “How could that be?”

  The reason was that my father had never been the sort to sing to his child, and my mother Enla had been carried away by a fever when I was but four summers old. The only thing I remembered her telling me about our Tinukeda’ya heritage was about the Dreaming Sea. She told me it was part of me and always would be, though I never knew quite what that meant. After she died, I asked my father why she had said the Dreaming Sea was in my blood. The question made him angry.

  “Do not ever let our masters hear you talk that way,” he told me. “If you speak of such things, our lords will think us ungrateful and superstitious.”

  “But what is the Dreaming Sea?”

  “An old and foolish story about the Lost Garden. Your mother should not have told you such a thing.”

  And that was the last my father Pamon Sur would ever speak about it. I was hurt by his refusal—the Dreaming Sea was something of my mother’s that I was being denied—but I did not bring it up again, not even with the other Tinukeda’ya I knew, and the memory began to fade. Then, as I grew older, I came to understand that my people kept silent about many such things for fear of displeasing our Zida’ya masters.

  “Pamon, are you listening?”

  I realized I had been lost in memory. “I ask your pardon, Yohe.”

  She looked at me longer than felt comfortable. “It must be strange not to know your own story,” she said at last.

  But I do know my own story, I thought. After all, I was not merely another Tinukeda’ya servant: I was Pamon Kes, armiger and great Lord Hakatri’s right hand. Few of my people, I felt certain, had ever been raised higher. But of course I said none of this.

  * * *

  • • •

  In the late morning of the next day we heard loud hoofbeats as we rode, as of many folk riding behind us up the Silver Way. The other armigers and I turned, prepared to fight if necessary, not certain whether these might be messengers from Asu’a demanding us to turn back or a pack of the mortal bandits that were said to make their home in the dark heights beyond the Gap, though I had never heard of mortals attacking a group of armed Zida’ya. Instead of either of those, though, a company of men appeared from the east and we saw by their banners that they were the same western mortals who had come to Asu’a to ask for the Protector’s help.

  The one called Cormach reined up as they reached us. “We heard that a company of your people were ahead of us, and we have run our horses almost to death trying to catch you,” he
said. “But look! Your mounts are not even breathing hard.”

  I smiled a little. “The horses of Asu’a’s stables travel swiftly without much effort, though we were not hurrying.”

  “I am surprised to find your company so small, though,” said the prince. “Did your folk not believe us when we told them about the monster we face?”

  Ineluki’s armiger Yohe (who always assumed the role of leader in our company of squires, since my master might have been firstborn, but I was not Zida’ya) told him, “Our lords race ahead of us, mortal, but they will wait for us when they reach their destination. Still, there is no certainty they plan to hunt the dragon that has so badly frightened your folk.”

  Cormach gave her a sour look. I could not help being impressed by this young mortal, who clearly set himself as high as nearly any Zida’ya. “You say that as though only mortals would be afraid, Armiger. Wait until you see the worm and hear its rasping breath. Then we will see what you fairy-folk are made from.”

  His words seemed to anger Yohe, but Ineluki’s squire was not as capricious as her master; she only shook her head, saying, “Nobody knows what they think of the dark until the sun sets.”

  After a little more talk it was decided that we would all travel together until we either caught up to the hunting party or our roads diverged. It was just as well we did not waste time arguing, because by early evening, when we had made our way a good distance along the lower edge of the Whitewake Heights, we at last came upon my master and his company. They were gathered by the Silver Way where it passed the mouth of a steep, narrow valley. I was relieved beyond words to see not only my own master Hakatri but his brother Ineluki too, although it was clear that the two of them were deep in disagreement. Hakatri was so angry he barely acknowledged me, and when Yohe went to greet her own lord-errant, Ineluki waved her back with a hard swipe of his hand.