The Roads of Taryn MacTavish, page 34
part #3 of Lords of Arcadia Series
This was really happening.
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Taryn lost a brief battle with nervous giggles (echoed all around her by excited foals) and fell onto her father’s support. She kissed his stubbly cheek, smelling scrulan and soap root and Old Spice, and felt him hug her tight.
“It’s a funny thing,” he murmured. “I’m told I’m supposed to have dreaded this day, but I’m just so proud of you.”
She giggled again, too close to tears to speak.
“Now.” Ian MacTavish put her at arm’s length and clapped her shoulder Farasai-fashion. “Let’s give this baby a last name before it comes out and picks one itself.”
She giggled some more, nodding, and took his arm to walk beside him.
There were so many people. She couldn’t remember ever seeing so many in one place before, although she knew she must have—the movie theater, the museum, the zoo…heck, the mall at Christmastime would have been able to give her ten people for every one here—but none of that seemed as real as this.
Rucombe was here, all their labor halted for one day of celebrations. The other kraals were represented, although she saw no chiefs in the crowd yet. They would all be at the bower, she supposed, to honor their lord. To honor her. But there were fauns here and there around the foals, with satyrs watching over them (her eyes met Dryleaf’s briefly; his face remained stone, but Wave beside him shyly smiled). There were sileni in their finery, holding feathery branches of tassel-reed to fan her as she walked by, and the breeze they made was very welcome. And there were the Dragon’s people perched on the roofs of the lodges, most of them grinning and all looking relaxed as they chatted with one another. She could see the antlers of rusakin well back in the crowd, catch the perfume of Pathfinders in the air, hear the slightly raucous cackling of harpies.
So many people.
She saw the bower Tonka had built her, a canopy of braided grass and flowers supported by dozens of willowy poles, carpeted in drifts of petals. It was more beautiful than any chapel. She saw Tonka standing within with Morathi at one side and the albino Morathi of Kimyamkela at the other. The Great Dragon stood just beyond the bower’s poles, his arms folded and his head low, but the bright fires of his eyes burning and flickering in the shadows of his changing face were clear enough. Arion held the same position and pose on the opposite side of the bower, without the intensity and with easy good humor in its place. Psychore appeared to be blacklisting the event, but the other Cerosan formed a tight knot behind Arion, all gleaming horn and grim expressions.
But there was only one Cerosan she wanted to see, and he was coming now from the western edge of Rucombe. She’d never seen him in clothes before.
She couldn’t help herself. She burst out laughing.
Antilles inclined his head with a long-suffering sigh, taking her hand as her father released it. “There is no justice,” he said. “You look magnificent in your apparel. I look an ass.”
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She couldn’t argue. He wore a toga, blindingly white, trimmed in crimson and gold. His hooves were capped in shiny gold, and the bracers he’d worn on his forearms since the first day she’d seen him had been changed out for golden shackles from which dangled three links of golden chain, but the crown was entirely new. It was a thick band of gold, well-cared for, but clearly very old, able to rest on his bullish brow only because it was also fastened to the base of his horns. His eyes in the shadow of this crown moved over her with the same fascination that she supposed she herself wore when looking at him.
His fingers brushed at her cheek through the veil, reminding her she was wearing it, reminding her why. They stepped into the shade of the bower together. Antilles dropped gracefully to one knee. Taryn attempted to do the same, then heaved a sigh and rested her clasped hands on her belly.
“Ah, but ‘tis fine,” Tonka whispered, patting her on the head in a fatherly fashion. “Thee is short enough. If thee were to kneel, I should have to lie down.”
“Right up until you said that, there was still a chance I’d marry you instead,” she whispered back, and Antilles, his head still bowed respectfully, chuckled.
“Ai!” Tonka gave his breast a smack, then straightened up and looked serious. “Rucombe welcomes its lord on the day of his wedding,” he called, and all the crowd silenced. “Rucombe welcomes she who will become his lady. Let the ground on which we stand be named for this day, and may it prove as fertile a field as the lady wedded on it.”
Taryn felt her smile slip at those words and she saw, just for an instant, a field of twisted, malformed crop under a blood-red sky. She swallowed hard, touched her stomach, and felt the heartening punch of a live fist strike at her.
“We are blessed, who prove fortunate enough to find love in this life, for the gods give us all hearts but no promise of what passion may warm them. Yet here are two.” Tonka smiled slightly, his gaze moving from one to the other of them. “Two hearts and one soul, and I can offer them no greater blessing than the love they have found for themselves.”
“He’s going to try anyway,” Arion whispered, speaking out of the corner of his mouth like a convict in the prison yard. “While we bake in the sun.”
His valet expressionlessly plucked a loose tassel-reed from the top of the bower and held it over Arion’s head, casting him in shade. Arion closed his eyes and sighed.
Tonka, although he did not dignify the goings-on behind him with a glance, did wait until they were over before continuing. “My lord, you have named this lady for your wife, but you wed her in Rucombe, and here in my kraal, we do not enter such bonds lightly. This is my own kinswoman and well-favored does her chieftain find her. Speak your oath to me ‘ere I give her.”
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Antilles raised his head (allowing a pause just long enough for Taryn to clearly hear her father’s grumbling, “He’s giving her, huh?”) and said, “Here, before all the envoys of my people and my protected, I claim this woman, Taryn, and take her to me, now and forever. I give coals for her hearth, grain for her larder, coin for her coffers, and one-half of all my holdings to be her legacy and that of her line. I give her my protection, my allegiance, my heart and my body.
All that I am and all that I possess, I give to my lady-wife, and look with joy down the path of our tomorrows.”
“Right,” Rhiannon muttered somewhere behind her. “And she’s got, like, half a candy bar she could share with him.”
Arion snickered. One of the Cerosan gave him a not-so-subtle kick.
“So much do I swear to her chieftain,” Antilles said. He slid an eye behind him, generously adding, “So much do I swear to her father,” then turned and took Taryn’s hand. “My oath to you, lady, needs no words at all.”
He reached into the folds of his toga, and the next thing she felt was a body-warmed band of metal slipping onto her finger. She looked down and saw her grandmother’s wedding ring, her diamond claddagh, and it fit her finger perfectly.
Taryn turned around, searching the surrounding crowd with a frown until she found a certain horseman’s broadly-beaming face. “I gave this to you, Koshra.”
“Aye,” said Koshra. “And I sold it for a heavy price, lady, for so much I have treasured our friendship that it has taken our lord a full year’s labor to buy what thee gave me for carrying an old nyati pelt.” His smile faded. “But I would have given it to thee freely, lady, if only thee had asked.”
Taryn looked down at her hand. Even through the interlocked branches of the wedding bower, a little sunlight found a way to shine on the diamond heart clasped in the golden hands of her claddagh. Hers.
“A full year’s labors, huh?”
“Lady.” Antilles shifted his arm so that he leaned confidentially over his bent knee. “I plowed a damned field for that slave-drover.”
“You know, I wondered why you did that.”
“I have brought him his full weight in gold and twice that in steel.”
“I thought it was just time to replace the spear-heads.”
“I built a lodge to house his warrior’s tack and retiled the hearth of his sleeping lodge.”
“Again…”
“And whatsoever he should ask until the end of his days, I shall give it.”
Antilles brought her fingers to his mouth and polished the ring with his breath.
“My oath is unending. No price is high enough. You shall have it all.”
“Oh Tilly.” She cupped his warm cheek tenderly. “Unfortunately, I already ate the other half of that candy bar.”
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Arion’s guffaws rang out until enough of his fellows hit him that he clamped his hands over his muzzle. “This is the best wedding I’ve ever attended!” he wheezed. “Ah, I wish your mother were here!”
Looking down into those steel-grey eyes, feeling the strength in the grip surrounding her hand, it was strangely easy to ignore Arion and his hilarity, easy to ignore the whole crowd. Taryn felt herself smiling, and not just with her lips; she almost believed she could radiate the quiet joy inside her into tangible rays of warmth. She’d been wracking her brain for days, trying to think of the perfect words. She’d written and rewritten and agonized and memorized, but now all of that went away. She spoke to him, to only him, and if a herd of nyati had stampeded through the bower, she couldn’t have noticed or cared.
“There’s nothing I can say to you,” she told him, caressing his cheek.
“Nothing I can give you, nothing I can do for you. On Earth, we have all kinds of traditional promises we make when we marry, to love, honor, cherish—”
“Obey,” Rhiannon inserted.
Antilles straightened up at once, his ears up and eyes hopeful.
“—through sickness and poverty and every other bad thing that can happen,” Taryn went on smoothly. “Well, considering the bad things we’ve already gone through, I can only tell you that you’ve always been there for me.
You complete me. You are my sunshine,” she said, and he laughed heartily.
“My only sunshine. And knowing that you’ll go on being there for me each and every day is one good thing that pays for all the bad ones. And so I can look with joy down the path of our tomorrows too, and promise to try, somehow, to prove myself worthy of that.”
“Thee might obey,” Tonka murmured.
“You stay out of this,” she said, still smiling.
“Rise then.”
Antilles did, accepting a cup of cool tea from Rucombe’s Morathi, while Taryn took one from the albino. Tonka produced a very old, ornate silver bowl and Eurydome stepped forward to receive it. They drank once, each from their own cups, then emptied them in slow streams into Eurydome’s bowl before handing back their empty cups. The white Morathi passed her hand over Taryn’s, looking into its depths with great interest as Tonka raised the ritual bowl.
“May thy lives together be long and happy, thy cares and sorrows few.
May there be solace given in distress, and shelter in thy storms. May the friends around thee prove faithful, may the gods look on thee with mercy, and may this joining know peace and pleasure until the end of thy days.”
Antilles drank first from the bowl, then Taryn, and then Tonka, and then the bowl made its way through the bower, each guest taking a sparing sip while foals waited at strategic points to fill it before it could be emptied. And she was married now. She was married.
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Tonka glanced at his daughter, his tail flicking.
“Fair fortune and long life,” Morathi declared, studying the cup Antilles had given her.
“Cool, and a fortune cookie in a cup.” Rhiannon joined them in the bower. “What’d you get? Are there Lotto numbers?”
“Compromise brings much happiness,” Taryn guessed, smiling expectantly at the albino Morathi.
“You came to our world in the season before snow,” the albino said in her distracted, dreaming way. She did not raise her voice and certainly the crowd hadn’t thinned, but suddenly it was very quiet. “And the road you walked to reach this day was strewn with stones of grave misfortune.”
Slowly, Antilles stood. Taryn stepped a little closer to him without thinking about it. Their hands met. His grip was strong.
“Before the snows of this year fall, the road that remains before you shall prove as perilous,” the white Morathi said, “and you must walk so much of it alone. Aye. And yet it ends as it began, in a place of enduring peace. But whether it shall be the peace of hearth and haven or of the grave, I cannot say.”
The Morathi raised her eyes to Taryn’s and smiled faintly, offering back the cup.
“Tis yours to keep,” she said. “Come what may.”
“I guess it is, isn’t it.” Taryn sighed, staring at the flecks of herbs stuck to the bottom and sides of her cup. “Heck, I’d have settled for, ‘Sincerity is the path to truth’.”
“So it is,” the Morathi agreed. “Heed well that wisdom in the forging of your road, for you have begun already its shaping.”
“I have?” Taryn managed a laugh of sorts, surprised. “I don’t suppose you can see where it’s going?”
The albino flicked her tail and looked away, her attention wandering up into the full face of the moon. “It changes with all that you do, and so it is not for me to know. But this I see clearly: If you do nothing, it ends at the burning wall of Outlook.”
Taryn’s hands forgot how to hold things. Her wedding cup slipped and landed unerringly on her slippered foot. She couldn’t seem to even blink her eyes, but it wasn’t the albino Morathi’s serene face she saw before her. It was the wall at Outlook, and the chipped, round holes in its charred logs. It was the black stain of dried blood below those awful holes. It was the greasy curtain of black smoke.
“Taryn?” Rhiannon grabbed both her arms. Had she started to fall over?
Her sister’s eyes were huge. “Are you okay? Say something!”
“Something,” she whispered.
Rhiannon released her with a shove. “Jesus, doesn’t that joke ever get old?”
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“Never,” Arion said. He touched Taryn’s arm. “Are you ill, sister? Is it the heat?”
“No. No, I’m fine.”
“Maiden?”
Great. Taryn braced herself to look at Antilles. She saw that ridiculous toga draping her lover—her husband, now—and fell into helpless giggles. He relaxed at once, but Rhiannon’s frown only grew. She never could fool her sister. “I need to sit down,” she said, and instantly, the words struck her as false ones. She may want to sit down, but she needed to move on.
‘Not today,’ she pleaded, rubbing restlessly at her stomach. ‘Let me have one day, just one!’
The white Morathi bent gracefully, retrieved her wedding cup, and placed it in Taryn’s hands. Her pale, pink eyes were tranquil ones, and pitiless.
‘Those were bullet holes,’ she thought, admitting it in whole words if still silent ones. It wasn’t Pathfinders and it wasn’t the Dragon’s doing. It was humans. It was humans with guns and a Road from Earth.
Somewhere, pipes began to play and the celebration started.
Somewhere, surely, people were lining up for kisses and congratulations, and Taryn knew she had to go and smile for them. She had to be happy, and some part of her still was and wanted to be, but she had to do more than that. She had to leave when it was over.
She had to find her road.
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49. The Dragon and the Unicorn
Say what you want about the barnyard smell, but the Farasai knew how to throw a party. Some music, most of it of the weepy-pipe variety (to be fair, there probably wasn’t much point in inventing dance music for people who couldn’t dance. What were they going to do, The Gallop?), lots of food, and barrels full of booze all over the place. Of course, the centerpiece of the whole feast had been the wedding cake, four layers tall, only a little uneven, and decorated with edible flowers painted in colored honey. Rhiannon had done most of the flower-painting herself, and she was proud of it, especially the speed at which it disappeared. A couple horsemen even took a little time to compliment her, and Taryn, of course, cried all over herself.
Now Rhiannon sat on a handy fence, drinking wine from a salad bowl, and watching her sister kiss her guests goodnight. It was a lot of kissing. None of it was on the cheek. And for crying out loud, her husband was standing right there.
Tonka came by with a flask of something for Antilles. They stood together, passing time while Taryn snogged away. A horse. What a huge letdown. When she thought of all the months she’d spent drooling over that picture of him, and here he was, a horse.
Rhiannon started to drink, discovered her bowl was empty, and hopped off the fence to score herself a refill. The ground canted slightly. She held on to the railing, walking with expertise honed to perfection on a college campus until she could dip her bowl in a wine barrel. When she looked up, Tonka was kissing Taryn. Really kissing her. She had her arms wrapped around his neck and her fingers twined in his hair. Everyone was smiling.
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The wine was bitter. Rhiannon’s lips hurt. She emptied her bowl, let it drop, and walked away from the crowd.
It wasn’t fair. She was the single girl here. If anyone should be lining up for kisses—
An image swam abruptly into focus: A line of horsemen stretching up in front of Rhiannon in one of those stripper-cages. Every hand had a dollar bill in it.
Rhiannon glanced behind her, leaning heavily on the side of a lodge.
Taryn and Tonka were still kissing, or maybe only talking. Their heads were close together, anyway. Probably kissing. Antilles was talking to his brother.
Nobody seemed to care that Taryn was—
Was what?
Rhiannon rubbed at her eyes, started walking again, and saw, standing alone at the shadowed edge of the common yard, the man everyone called the Dragon. He was watching Taryn, too.
