Page 46 of Prize of the Warlord
“Well—stop it.” Her voice is petulant, exasperated. She looks so comically flustered that I can’t help breaking into a small, blushing smile.
And wonder of wonders, her lips twitch. She fights the smile, shaking her head and turning away, fingers pressing her mouth. “It’s not funny.”
“I know.” My smile trembles. “It’s tragic.” I drop my voice to a bare whisper. “I think I love him.”
She turns back to me, eyes wide with a half-delighted alarm. “No. Oh gods no. Tell me you’re joking.”
I shake my head.
“And he—” She lifts her eyebrows.
I know the unspoken question. Does he love me?
Biting my lips, I look toward the Warlord, and Zeha follows my gaze. Her brother is driving a metal tent stake into the frigid ground, and when he’s done he glances our way. There’s a flash of pleased joy in his face when he looks at me. It’s subtle and quick, but his sister sees it as clearly as I do.
She exhales, long and weary. “May the gods have mercy on both of you.” She strokes the long nose of the Warlord’s horse, sighing again.
“What about you?” I ask. “Do you have someone?”
“A man? No. I prefer women,” she replies. “Less smelly. Less prone to talk ofseedandclaimingandbreeding.” She fakes a deep, gruff male voice as she speaks the last several words, and I laugh. Her eyes crinkle at the corners when she smirks.
“You remind me of my sister Joss,” I say. “She’s a warrior, and she prefers women too, for those and other reasons. You’d like her, I think.”
“Me,likea Southern warrior?” Zeha scoffs. “I doubt that.”
“Stranger things have happened,” I say softly, my eyes fixed on the golden bearded face of the Warlord as he strides toward us.
“Mouse,” he says, low.
Zeha rolls her eyes at the velvet in his voice. “You impossible fool.” And she smacks him hard on the cheek.
“What?” For a second, he’s not a Warlord, but a boy, stung and offended. “What did I do?”
“You know what you did.” Zeha stalks away, unwinding the leather hawker’s cuff from her forearm.
52
That night, I sit on a log near the others of our company and partake of the evening meal by the heat of the fire. The sky arches impossibly huge overhead, its size compounded by the low stature of the scraggly shrubs dotting the land around us. We’re camped in a shallow dip between hills, our small cluster of tents exposed to the black night.
These tents are too small to have fires inside them. Will I be snuggling with the Warlord tonight, for warmth? The thought heats my face and my blood just as surely as the glow from the dancing flames.
The stew we’re eating is good, made from some meat with a flavor I don’t recognize. But a few minutes after I finish eating, I realize with dread certainty that it isn’t settling well.
I can’t approach the Warlord about it—he’s seated on the opposite side of the fire, between two of his men. They’re beginning a song—one of the bone-deep, humming chants they like to sing during our rides. The Warlord tips his head down, opening his throat and voicing a note lower than I’d ever thought humanly possible. He holds it long, while the others thrum and vocalize with him.
I’d like to sit and listen. But I have to go. Now. Before I soil my borrowed clothes.
Thankfully Zeha is beside me, so I whisper my predicament to her and she escorts me far from the fire, into the darkness.
What follows is the worst and most humiliating experience of my life. Back home, when my bowels revolted like this, I had a privy to use. Out here in the frozen wilderness, I have the shallow hole that Zeha hastily scraped for me.
It’s a long, messy process. By the end, my thighs and calves are sore and trembling from crouching for so many minutes. I kept my clothes clean, and I was able to wash myself thoroughly with plenty of fresh snow; but my rear is numb with cold, and my face burns with shame. Quickly I toss lumps of snow over the hole and return to Zeha.
She rises from the spot where she’s been sitting with her back to me. “All done?”
“I’m sorry,” I tell her. “For how long it took, and for the—the sounds, and the smell.”
“I’ve smelled the guts of a dead man,” she says bluntly. “I’ve heard the squelch of flesh being ripped from bodies by thejäkel.And I’ve had a bout or two of sickness myself. It happens.”
