About this instrument they had hung upon her, useless and discordant in her hands.
Lucas cocked his head and stood very still on the round perch. His green eyes flashed with unearthly fire.
Larken looked at Lucas questioningly. "What?" she asked, this time wanting an answer.
Suddenly, a coldness overwhelmed her, as though the dry riverbed breathed the memory of violent water, of ice. A shadow passed between her and the moonlight-a cloud, a night bird …
The shadow paused above her.
Lucas covered his head with his wing and made a low, painful cry.
Slowly, Larken turned.
The dark man smiled handsomely, his face framed in moonlight. His tight-lidded amber eyes moved over her, and the black silk tunic rose rhythmically on his shoulders and chest. His legs were long and powerful, and he wore black leather boots-an odd choice for the desert, Larken thought somewhere at the edge of her mind.
He was a strange combination of beauty and eeriness, like a distorted reflection of the moon in water. Larken regarded him suspiciously, her hand drifting slowly and surely to the knife at her belt.
The dark man held her gaze, nodded.
"You are Larken the bard," he said, as though he named her for the first time with his words. With a movement lithe and graceful, he stepped toward her, wrested her hand from her knife . . . and kissed her fingers elegantly, his eyes never leaving hers.
Lucas shrieked from his perch, swelled with cop shy;per light, and tried to fly at the man, but his jesses tangled.
Larken swallowed hard and nodded, recovering her hand and soothing the hawk. "Hush, Lucas. It's all right."
The bird fluttered and hopped, but obediently kept to the perch.
"I am Tamex," the man said. "I come from the south, from the shining foothills."
Larken composed her face into neutrality. The man's hand had been very cold and hard. She started to sign a greeting, but something baffled her hands.
"While your army fought in the grasslands, I… crossed the desert. I searched for the Que-Nara camp, and awaited your return. Will you speak with me?"
I speak to no one but Lucas. I only sing, she motioned.
"I don't understand," said Tamex. "I know you can talk. I can hear what you say. Will you try?"
"You can hear me speak?" Larken's voice was husky, uncertain.
Tamex nodded. "I have come to serve your leader. I have come to undo the bondage of Istar. And I have come to listen to you."
Larken shook her head, deflecting his last offer. " 'Tis a tall order, to undo that city. Istar is the heart of the world." And then, after a moment, "How is it you hear my speech? It has been cursed."
"Does it matter?" Tamex dissembled, his reptilian eyes at last flickering away from hers. "Does any of that matter?"
He let his eyes play lazily across Larken's kneeling form, over her blond hair, her bronzed shoulders, and her slim thighs, bared to the evening's coolness.
His gaze flickered over the lyre and paused. The black diamonds in the heart of his eyes shuddered, narrowed, and vanished. Then, almost casually, his glance rested on the drum at Larken's side and the bone drumhammer.
"I have heard you play," he said. "Not the lyre. The drum. Your songs and words are worthy of heroes."
Flustered, the bard set down the lyre and reached for the drumhammer. It slipped from her hand and rattled noisily against the drum.
Tamex continued. "You are the one who exalts the Lord of the Rebels."
" 'Exalts'?"
"You magnify him beyond his deeds."
For a moment, brief as the gap between lightning and thunder, the bard's eyes widened. She felt exposed, uncovered by a sudden, surprising welling in her heart, as if she swirled in dark airlessness. Then the world tilted back into focus-the arroyo, the twining moonlight, the tall handsome warrior standing above her.
"Tell me about him," the dark man whispered.
She rose unsteadily and took a deep breath. Again she was Larken; the words stumbled back to her.
"About his gifts? His prophecies?" She turned the drumhammer in her hand.
"Tell me."
"Twenty-five years ago," Larken began, "the Que-Nara found a child nestled against a dune.
"We never knew who left him there, who had abandoned him to the harsh desert elements. It was great fortune, almost a miracle, that anyone noticed the baby. Fordus had not cried or called out, not even then, and the man who found him, a Plains shy;man chief named Kestrel, feared that the child was damaged, addled …
" 'Touched by Sirrion,' the Namer had said, as Kestrel held the silent infant before him on the Nam shy;ing Night. 'The Firemaster is in his eyes.'
"It was the call of the poet, the madman."
"Then he was touched … by the gods?" Tamex asked, a brief, enigmatic smile passing over his pale face.
"So the Namer said," Larken replied, her eyes downcast, looking at the lyre on the ground. "But none of the Plainsmen understood or even wanted to.
"In each generation, only a few are touched by the fire god. Sirrion's mark comes double-edged: For each child who is blessed with inspiration, with insight and poetry, a thousand others become bab shy;blers, lunatics who dance at the red moon's rising, the responsibility for their complete care falling to their families, their people."
" 'Tis a hard life for those bearing the gods' touch," Tamex observed dryly. "But how did the Plainsmen … receive him?"
"The chief took the news … well, like a chieftain," Larken began. "After all, he had found the child and chosen to rescue it. Kestrel was a widower; no woman's hand graced his tents. He tended the child himself, awkwardly but well enough. He handed Fordus over to an attentive wet nurse, carried him in a pouch sewn into his shirt lining.
"The blue-eyed baby was hale enough, and grew tough, thin, and sinewy-like any Plainsman child.
But always the tribe watched for the sign of Sirrion's touch, for vision or madness. "It was fifteen years before they knew for sure." Tamex started to speak, to interrupt, to ask a ques shy;tion, but Larken had begun the first great story, the one she had sung a hundred times around the rebel campfires when morale was low, when faith in For-dus ebbed or wavered.
It felt strange to say the words again. It felt strange not to sign or sing them.
"To the eye of the warrior and the eye of the out shy;runner, young Fordus seemed normal enough- hunting with the other children, helping with the fire, and the catching of lizards for the cook pot. He sat watch when he was old enough to hold a spear and wait out the night.
"Yet when he first began to speak, at the late age of five or six, his talk was veiled and bizarre, a pecu shy;liar poetry of riddle and paradox.