by patronage.
“For the Snow Wolf!” Grundan cried.
“For the Snow Wolf!” his men replied.
The word of Grundan’s appointment spread quickly, and in the days that followed, as Tuzza visited other units, he found that each had added a snow wolf—the prophesied companion of the Weaver—to its pennant.
“Your men speak of themselves as the Snow Wolves,” Jenah Gewindi said, walking beside Tuzza.
Jenah, alongside Ratha and Giri Monabi, had been one of Archer’s three chief lieutenants in the campaign against Tuzza’s men. Giri had fallen in the battle of the canyon, and his brother Ratha was still observing telzehten. This left Jenah as the only Anari commander on hand to forge a command coalition with the Bozandari, and at Archer’s order he had spent the past two days with Tuzza in the Bozandari camp, observing their training and the appointment of new officers as needed.
“Yes,” Tuzza said. “It began with the commissioning of one of your brethren. I have since been told that it was the decision of Rearmark Grundan and two of his fellow filemarks to add the Snow Wolf to their pennant. But it has served to rally my men, to give them a new sense of shared identity.”
Jenah nodded. “This is important, Topmark. Even now there is talk of doing the same among the Anari.”
“Your men would share the symbol of a Bozandari legion?” Tuzza asked, incredulous.
“Perhaps,” Jenah said. “Perhaps we both share a symbol of and allegiance to something greater than either of our peoples. It is this that I have suggested, when I have been asked for my view on the issue.”
“Very politic,” Tuzza said, smiling.
“An alliance cannot be formed without such,” Jenah said with a faint shrug. “My people are no more eager to fight beside yours than your men are to fight beside us. Yet necessity commands it, and it falls upon men like us to make it possible.”
“How many are you?” Tuzza asked. “We never knew, for certain, during the campaign past.”
“We were never more than five thousand under sword, and fewer still in the end,” Jenah said.
“Between us we are barely a legion strong,” Tuzza said, his brow furrowed.
“Perhaps,” Jenah said. “But even if we were thrice thus, we could not count on weight of numbers in the march to Bozandar. And in our very weakness may lay strength.”
“How so?” Tuzza asked.
Jenah smiled. “Consider how your emperor would respond if three legions marched out of Anahar.”
“That would seem nothing less than an invasion,” Tuzza said, nodding. “They would see no option but battle.”
“Precisely,” Jenah said. “But an understrength legion, composed of Bozandari and Anari marching side by side. That can seem like a peace envoy.”
“Let us hope,” Tuzza said. “My men have no desire to slay their brethren. However committed they may be to the Weaver, to lift swords against men they have known and fought beside before would be very difficult.”
“Aye,” Jenah said. “Thus it would be for Anari also. No, our strength will lie not in numbers, but in the gifts of our Ilduin, and perhaps your own gifted tongue.”
Tuzza looked at Jenah. “If our future rests upon my gift for clever speech, I fear we are all in graver danger than I knew.”
“It will come to all of us to give what we can,” Jenah said. “Whether that will be enough rests on shoulders larger than our own.”
Tess sat beside an icy stream, her feet bare and pink in the cold. The need to escape to quiet and privacy had driven her into the mountains by herself. She could still see Anahar’s beauty below, so she was in no danger of becoming lost. But the hike had made her feet tender, since it appeared her new boots were better made for riding than walking. She had soaked them in the stream until she could bear the frigid water no more.
As she turned her ankle to one side, she noted again the tattoo of the white rose, still as fresh-looking as if it had been done within the past year or two. How did she know that about tattoos?
For a moment, she closed her eyes, reaching for the information, but as always when she sought her past, it was as if the doors closed even more impenetrably. A small sigh escaped her, and she shivered a bit as the icy breeze caressed her feet. She should put her boots on again, before her bare feet sucked out all the warmth that her woolen cloak preserved.
But instead she looked again at the tattoo, knowing in some unreachable part of herself that it was more than a pretty decoration. It said something about her past, about who she was. Perhaps it even said something about her destiny.
Gingerly she poked a hand out from the shelter of her cloak and touched it. Within, she felt no reaction to it at all. At this moment, it was nothing but a pretty little bit of folly.
But it was her only true link with her past, that and the memory of holding her dying mother in her arms, a memory that Elanor had returned to her. An unhappy, unwanted, inexplicable memory. It told her almost nothing, and she had a crying need to know something.
If she was a pawn of the gods, and it appeared she was, then why must she take every action in blindness? Why was she permitted to know little of any real use?
Her own powers, powers that had been steadily revealing themselves, terrified her. If she was capable of so much, ’twould be better for everyone if she knew how to control this wild talent. Instead she discovered her abilities in moments of dire need, and so far as she could tell, other than healing, she had little say in what she did.
She lifted her fingers from the tattoo and studied it for another few seconds, then sighed and pulled her white leather boots on again.
For some reason, nearly every piece of serviceable clothing she owned, from the very first clothes given to her by Sara so long ago at the Whitewater Inn, was white. When she had asked the bootmaker to make her a fresh pair, he had made them white. She was quite certain she had not asked for that. The same had happened with every other item that she requested.
A little smile curled one corner of her mouth. Only her gown for the wedding had been a different color, and now that the wedding was past, she had no excuse to wear it. It was as if some silent conspiracy existed, insisting she wear only the color of the white wolves, the White Lady, the Weaver.
Shod once again, her feet numbed enough that she did not feel the mild irritation of her new boots, she resumed her hike, now heading toward Anahar. The quiet and solitude had allowed her to relax, a luxury she rarely knew. For a little while she had stopped worrying at the temple for more information, she had escaped councils of war, and the cacophony of voices that accompanied the crowding of the city of Anahar by Anari summoned from far and wide to battle.
A snatch of music danced across her mind, and she recalled the day that Anahar had sung. The rainbow-hued city had gleamed from within its every stone as the music had emerged from them, sending out a call to every Anari, a call that could be heard nearby with the ears, but elsewhere with the heart, according to the Anari.
And the Anari had come from
