Nanya of the Butterflies (Sun Wolf and Starhawk) Read online

  Horses trotted from the narrow canyon of the main street that wound its way up from the harbor, leggy northern animals, not the stocky little ponies more common in the Islands. Sun Wolf, who had worked for Sidthe Blackmouth (and loathed the man like everyone else) recognized without trouble Blackmouth’s daughter: same round face, same aggressive jaw, same pug nose and haughty, slightly protuberant blue eyes. Though she rode sidesaddle, with yards of bullion-crusted velvet in an unbecoming royal purple spread over the horse’s rump, she rode at the head of the procession, as became a reigning monarch. The man who rode beside her, rigidly reigning his mount so that its nose came no farther forward than the royal stirrup, was less obviously the old King’s brother, taller in stature, slimmer, with an aquiline nose and only a suggestion of resemblance about the eyes.

  …If you ask me, Moonweasel had said in the tavern in Kwest Mralwe, I think it’s Lord Darvi who’s running things in Ilfagen…

  The third rider – pushed behind Darvi Blackmouth by the narrowness of the street, he brought his horse around at once to the Lady Caia’s other side the moment the cavalcade entered the square – with his broad shoulders, shining steel cuirass, and light-brown curls bared to the late afternoon sun, could be no one but Martus Dragon-slayer, smiling and leaning from his saddle to return the greetings of the merchants who came to their shop-doors to wave. He tossed a coin to the beggar as they passed through the palace gates, followed by a long train of mounted guardsmen – longer, Sun Wolf reflected, than it might have been before the arrival of the dragon.

  The silver glinted in the sun.

  *

  Nearly every person in town – or at least everyone Sun Wolf spoke to, and it seemed to him that he and the Hawk spent the rest of the afternoon and well into the evening speaking to virtually everyone in Ilfagen – had opinions about who would want to do the city harm, and why. Suspects ranged from the priests who ruled the crumbling remains of Preth Vanu (“Wizards is what they are – everyone’s always said so! They’d love to see us brought down…”), to the exiled aristocrats of the Houses of the Cronesme and Grodat that Blackmouth had thrown out of the city when he confiscated its trading fleet (“It’s revenge, pure and simple, revenge and hatred of all of Blackmouth’s blood…”), to various local lords who thought they, and not Darvi Blackmouth (“What’s he, but a merchant and a penpusher, to be ruling when men of strength and steel and blood are passed by? ”) should control the city, and in any case nobody in the town had heard that any of those parties had been hiring, or inquiring for, sorcerous assistance.

  But having been, himself, targeted eighteen months previously by a powerful wizard who sought a lesser mage as a slave, towards sunset Sun Wolf stopped, on his way up from the harbor, at the door of a shabby little shop whose painted sign displayed a blue-winged butterfly.

  Hand on the door-latch, he paused. “You ever wear stinkum, Hawk?”

  “I take it that question is rhetorical?”

  “No,” said the Wolf, slightly miffed at her startled tone. “I mean it. Here I’ve known you for eleven years, you’ve been my lady for three, and I’ve never bought you perfume. Or anything else,” he added, disconcerted at the realization.

  Her face – narrow, tanned, and coolly expressionless as the statue of some ancient warrior-god – melted suddenly into a smile whose wry warmth nearly stopped his breath. “And when I write to my parents—” They’d been dead for decades, the Wolf knew, “—that’s all I ever discuss: how mean you are to me and how you never buy me perfume.” She took his hands in slender callused fingers that could – and had been known to – snap a man’s neck, and brushed his lips with hers.

  Then she turned, and preceded him into the shop, leaving him flummoxed in the street.

  The woman behind the counter, short and curvaceous with hair like a new copper coin, gave them a twinkling smile – she’d clearly seen the kiss – and made a gesture with her hand. For a moment the illusion of blue butterflies fluttered sparkling around their heads.

  “And you must be Nanya,” said the Wolf. He’d heard her name half a dozen times that afternoon, when the subject of wizards in the Petti-Gwarl came up.

  Nanya Butterfly was the only thing resembling a mage that anyone in Ilfagen knew about.

  “At your service.” She bobbed him a curtsey. The blue butterflies returned to her, and landed on her hair – all except one, which landed on Starhawk’s. They remained – illusions, but beautiful, gently fanning their iridescent wings – throughout the succeeding conversation. “How may I help you?”

  “First,” said the Wolf, “Hawk, would you like some perfume?”

  He almost thought she’d shake her head, with that slight flex at one corner of her lips that spoke of thoughts and memories she never shared, and leave the subject at that… but she didn’t. In Sun Wolf’s experience, female mercenaries – and there were a few in every troop – tended to dress and comport themselves like the men out of self-defense, but their taste in such things as jewelry, cosmetics, and perfume ranged the spectrum from Who has time for gee-gaws? to Holy screaming gods!!!... and it wasn’t only the women who’d go into battle wearing jeweled earrings, either. Under Nanya Butterfly’s expert questioning, Starhawk spoke of the scents she remembered from her strange, lonely childhood in the west: heather, frankincense, storms over the sea. From these the little lady – she couldn’t have been more than twenty-three, Sun Wolf guessed – put together an ounce of oil that suggested wind and sweet-grass and summer rather than flowers or musk: a scent that reminded him of Starhawk, even had she not been in the room.

  Nanya Butterfly herself smelled of honey and roses and oranges, and had she not been in the room the Wolf wasn’t sure that he wouldn’t still have scented in it the bright chime of her laughter and the twinkle of her eyes. When she handed over the little porcelain flask to the uncharacteristically flustered Starhawk, Sun Wolf asked, “Who taught you?”

  And when the perfumer looked at him, startled, with those long-lashed brown eyes he reached out a finger to touch the butterflies in her hair. One of them immediately climbed up onto his finger, but he turned his hand with a warrior’s speed and passed his thumb completely through its wings, before it could move or appear to fly away. Then Nanya smiled, answering the challenge in Sun Wolf’s single golden eye.

  “I had an aunt, in Gwenth.” The sun slipped behind the tall roofs of the houses across the street, filling the little shop with shadows. Nanya gestured, and the wicks of the lamps kindled: two pierced copper globes hanging from the beams in the shop, and a beautiful bronze lamp behind the counter, shaped like a dragon with red glass eyes and a mane of purple and green enameled ribbons.

  “She make perfumes, too?”

  The brightness of the young woman’s face faded; she looked aside. “She was a healer. She lived in the ruins at the back of town. The Wizard King had spies in the city. I never knew who they were, nobody did. One day I went out to visit her and she was gone. I left town that night…”

  “I’m sorry.” His gravelly voice was low.

  The short little fingers made a quick gesture, pushing aside the past. “It happened. I went to Vorsal, and apprenticed to a perfumer there.”

  Sun Wolf recalled what had happened to him in that part of the world, and shivered. “And did anyone,” he asked, “—any mage greater than yourself – ever try to enslave you? Either in Vorsal, or since then? Has that happened here?”

  “Here?”

  “You’ve heard nothing of any mage greater than yourself in the peninsula?”

  She shook her head, eyes wide, as if not certain even what to do with this information.

  And indeed, Sun Wolf reflected, in his own experience the wizard who had tried to enslave him had been almost invisible to his perception of magic. He’d thought the man was only another one of the merchants of Kwest Mralwe, until it was almost too late. Even as he’d thought Moggin was a powerful and dangerous mage when the harmless scholar was nothing of the sort.

>   You couldn’t tell. It could be anyone.

  Quietly, he went on, “You watch yourself, Butterfly. I don’t know how powerful a mage has to be, to trap and enslave another. But I think someone summoned that dragon. I felt human magic in my vision of the thing. If anything – strange – befalls you, if you feel a spell trying to trap you, either in waking or in a dream, I’ll be at the Widow Kubaba’s.”

  Nanya whispered, “All right.”

  The shop-bell tinkled behind them. A woman passed them in the door as they stepped out into the street; a little girl clung to her skirt. When Sun Wolf glanced over his shoulder, back into that lamp lit sanctum that smelled of honey and roses and oranges, in time to see Nanya greet her new customers, and smiling call the illusion of a pink-and-golden bird to land on the child’s hand.

  *

  “You sure about what you dreamed, Chief?” Starhawk emerged from the broken doorway of a cottage, dusting ashes from her gloved hands. “About the dragon just dropping out of the sky on this place? About the magic that called it?”

  Sun Wolf looked around him at the charred remains of the half-dozen humble dwellings, the surrounding fields already rank with summer weeds. As if the echoes of his dream stuck to the stove-in rafters, the ripped tangles of wattle and daub, he heard again the screams of the villagers who’d died that night: burned in the houses, or found in the morning torn to pieces in the streets. Of the three families who’d shared this little settlement four women and two young lads of sixteen were gone entirely, their bodies not even found.

  “It’s the surest I am of anything.” He spoke hesitantly, his voice scraping like rocks and old iron. “I felt magic. I saw the dragon…”

  “And the dragon you described sounds exactly like what the shepherd-boys saw at the other village.” The Hawk tucked her hands into her sword belt and walked around the corner of the house, scanning the ruin with calculating eyes.

  Claw-marks gouged the wall of the nearest house: the Wolf could place his whole hand between two of them. At the other settlement – four or five miles away across the sunny fields, and attacked eight nights after this one – the carnage had been worse.

  So what’s wrong?

  Something was. He’d fought too many battles, led too many ambushes, out-foxed too many kinglets and merchant-councils and land-chiefs over pay-outs not to smell something amiss.

  “Did you see what happened before the attack?” Starhawk re-appeared around the corner of what had been a shed, a couple of buckles and an ornamental harness-brass in her hand. They’d searched both settlements for coins, strongboxes, anything out of the ordinary, and had found nothing.

  Nothing but ruin and the smell of death. Not even tracks, though the terrified villagers from the settlements near-by had described fearsome marks among the houses the day after the attack, and the drag-marks of a spiny tail.

  He shook his head. “I’ve been meditating every goddam evening for six frakking months,” he said, “reaching out for magic of some kind – any kind. This’s the only whiff of it I’ve got. I’m damn sure it’s the only reason I dreamed what I did.” He looked around him again at the ruins, calling back every detail of his dream. “But if a wizard called down a dragon here, it makes even less sense.”

  “Could be avoiding the city deliberately. How many were killed in the other place?”

  “Ten. They only found the bodies of five.”

  “Plus livestock gone,” said the Hawk. “And six eaten here. That’s a lot of meat in eight days, Chief. You don’t think it’s brooding or something? Feeding little dragonettes?”

  “Better frakking not be.” He turned back to where the horses were tied, then paused, arrested by the sight of more claw-rakes on another house.

  She’d gone on ahead toward the horses, but returned to him when he didn’t follow. “What’s on your mind?”

  Mingled with her usual scents of horse and leather and soap, he caught the faintest nostalgic whiff of sweet-grass and the sea, and smiled.

  “I’m not sure.” He gazed at the claw-marks for a moment longer, scratching at a corner of his golden mustache. “Let’s take a look at the third place tomorrow – that little land-chief’s strong-hold Kubaba told us about. It’s south of town, she said, and I don’t think we can make it by sunset today. I want to see it – and have you see it – before we get into what I’m thinking.”

  Her sidelong glance included a tilted eyebrow, but she only said, “Whatever you say, Chief. But what I’m thinking, is that it looks like a diversion.”

  They followed the coast road back towards town, green hills on their right turning to yellow already on their summits – the rainy season had ended about two weeks ago – and to their left the Strait that separated the Gwarl Peninsula from the Inner Islands of the Megantic. Above the faintest of sea-hazes Senat’s wooded mountains rose shaggy and dark; north and south and dotting the Strait in between at least two dozen tiny islets broke the hard blue-black of the water, crowned in pines and ringed in bright little collars of chop. Small boats flitted among them like white-winged birds.

  “Could be laired up on any of ‘em,” he remarked, and Starhawk nodded.

  “If it was, you can bet Shamash Hadru, or Bram Kethel, would have got that information out of the local fishermen. You saw the size of those claw-marks. The thing that made ‘em has to be huge. So why hasn’t anybody seen it in between attacks?”

  “Good question.” Despite the fact that every one of the books in Sun Wolf’s slender library stated that one couldn’t scry a dragon, Sun Wolf had spent most of the day following his dream meditating over the crystal Moggin had given him – which worked under more ordinary circumstances about three-quarters of the time – and, when that didn’t yield sight of the dragon, over bowls of water, ink, and burning coals. He had achieved nothing but a splitting headache, but to Moggin’s I told you so he had retorted, exasperated, that if he believed every nay-sayer who had ever told him this or that thing couldn’t be done, he’d have sat down on several previous occasions and let himself be killed by various other mercenaries and the Wizard King… to say nothing of not collecting payment from various kings and merchant-councils, for services rendered.

  Last night, returning from Nanya’s shop, he had repeated the exercise, again to no avail.

  Now he said, “There’s a lot people don’t know about dragons. Even in this part of the world, where they’re reasonably close. The owner of the Peacock calls them snaky, but that bronze lamp in Nanya Butterfly’s shop looked more like a slug that’s been eating too many lettuces.” Since giving up killing for hire and taking to the study of wizardry, Sun Wolf had also acquired a garden, and an abiding hatred of slugs. “Only three of our books talk about dragons – the ones I can read, anyway – and most of what they say is all, Men report this who have seen them, and, ‘Tis said…”

  “I don’t suppose anybody who’s gotten a close-up view of a dragon was in any shape to write much about it afterwards. Did it occur to you, Chief…”

  He flung up his hand. “Riders coming.”

  Starhawk drew rein. The muffled clatter of hooves came not from the track that led to the city, but across the hills, paced slow, so as not to raise dust.

  Sun Wolf added, “Frak,” as he and the Hawk turned their horses and two mounted men appeared from the brush of a gully behind them. At the same moment an arrow struck Sun Wolf’s horse, only inches from the Wolf’s own thigh; the animal reared with a scream of pain and Starhawk drove her mount in close, reached to grab his arm.

  He flung himself across onto the crupper of her horse, which staggered a little under the weight but galloped gamely up the road toward town. Starhawk veered the animal’s course, first right and then left, as more arrows whined around them. She swerved to avoid the clump of trees ahead, knowing even before they saw him that there’d be an ambusher there, and Sun Wolf – who’d practiced diligently the art of spell casting in an emergency – flung a flash-spell into the trees and was gratified, both
by the burst of blinding light and by the wild neigh of equine terror, followed immediately by a crash as a frightened horse dumped its rider and fled.

  Starhawk dug in her spurs and the Wolf tightened his grip on her waist, feeling the horse labor beneath them. There was a stream-cut a few hundred yards ahead, beyond the point where an ambush would station men. He said, “Pull up,” and she obeyed, though pursuit thundered behind them.

  Source power from the sun and the earth – limit power behind us – The meditation was clumsy, uncertain. Six bursts of fire in a semi-circle… this better work…

  The most flashes he’d called up in his practices with Moggin’s books back home had been four…

  Starhawk turned the horse, and Sun Wolf identified their pursuers: seven riders, in two clumps, bandits or marcs by their clothes and the poor quality of their horseflesh and damn close. As it did in battle, his perception slowed and calmed, like aiming an arrow when you had only one shot.

  He flung out his hand, made the command strong and perfect as light in his mind, and the flash of fire in the air was blinding, a thousand times brighter than he’d thought it would be. The pursuing horses reared, screamed, two of them fell, and Sun Wolf sprang from the tired beast’s back – Starhawk right behind him – and rolled into the thin brush at the roadside…