Nesryn let the thought settle as she moved to the quivers, pulling out arrows. The metal tips were heavier than those she’d used in Adarlan, the shaft slightly thicker. Designed to cut through brutal winds at racing speeds. Perhaps, if they were lucky, take out a wyvern or two.
She selected arrows from various quivers, setting them into her own before she strapped it across her back and approached the line where Borte, Sartaq, and a few others were silently watching.
“Pick a mark,” Nesryn told Borte.
The woman smirked. “Neck, heart, head.” She pointed to each of the three dummies, a different mark for each one. Wind rattled them, the aim and strength needed to hit each utterly different. Borte knew it—all the warriors here did.
Nesryn lifted an arm behind her head, dragging her fingers along the fletching, the feathers rippling against her skin as she scanned the three targets. Listened to the murmur of the winds racing past Rokhal, that wild summons she heard echoed in her own heart. Wind-seeker, her mother had called her.
One after another, Nesryn withdrew an arrow and fired.
Again, and again, and again.
Again, and again, and again.
Again, and again, and again.
And when she finished, only the howling wind answered—the wind of Torke, the Roarer. Every training ring had stopped. Staring at what she’d done.
Instead of three arrows distributed amongst the three dummies, she’d fired nine.
Three rows of perfectly aligned shots on each: heart, neck, and head. Not an inch of difference. Even with the singing winds.
Sartaq was grinning when she turned to him, his long braid drifting behind him, as if it were a sulde itself.
But Borte elbowed past him, and breathed to Nesryn, “Show me.”
For hours, Nesryn stood atop the Rokhal training ring and explained how she’d done it, how she calculated wind and weight and air. And as much as she showed the various rotations that came through, they also demonstrated their own techniques. The way they twisted in their saddles to fire backward, which bows they wielded for hunting or warfare.
Nesryn’s cheeks were wind-chapped, her hands numb, but she was smiling—wide and unfailingly—when Sartaq was approached by a breathless messenger who had burst from the stairwell entrance.
His hearth-mother had returned to the aerie at last.
Sartaq’s face revealed nothing, though a nod from him had Borte ordering all the onlookers to go back to their various stations. They did so with a few grins of thanks and welcome to Nesryn, which she returned with an incline of her head.
Sartaq set his quiver and bow on the wooden rack, extending a hand for Nesryn’s. She passed him both, flexing her fingers after hours of gripping bow and string.
“She’ll be tired,” Borte warned him, a short sword in her hand. Her training, apparently, was not over for the day. “Don’t pester her too much.”
Sartaq threw an incredulous look at Borte. “You think I want to get smacked with a spoon again?”
Nesryn choked at that, but shrugged into the embroidered cobalt-and-gold wool coat, belting it tightly. She trailed the prince as he headed into the warm interior, straightening her wind-tossed hair as they descended the dim stairwell.
“Even though Borte is to one day lead the Eridun, she trains with the others?”
“Yes,” Sartaq said without glancing over his shoulder. “Hearth-mothers all know how to fight, how to attack and defend. But Borte’s training includes other things.”
“Like learning the different tongues of the world.” Her use of the northern language was as impeccable as Sartaq’s.
“Like that. And history, and … more. Things even I am not told of by either Borte or her grandmother.”
The words echoed off the stones around them. Nesryn dared ask, “Where’s Borte’s mother?”
Sartaq’s shoulders tensed. “Her sulde stands on Arundin’s slopes.”
Just the way he spoke it, the cold cut of his voice …“I’m sorry.”
“So am I,” was all Sartaq said.
“Her father?”
“A man her mother met in distant lands, and whom she did not care to hold on to for longer than a night.”
Nesryn considered the fierce, wicked young woman who’d fought with no small skill in the training rings. “I’m glad she has you, then. And her grandmother.”
Sartaq shrugged. Dangerous, strange territory—she’d somehow waded into
a place where she had no right to pry.
But then Sartaq said, “You’re a good teacher.”
“Thank you.” It was all she could think to say. He’d kept close to her side while she walked the others through her various positions and techniques, but had said little. A leader who did not need to constantly be filling the air with talking and boasting.
He blew out a breath, shoulders loosening. “And I’m relieved to see that the reality lives up to the legend.”
Nesryn chuckled, grateful to be back on safer ground. “You had doubts?”
They reached the landing that would take them to the great hall. Sartaq let her fall into step beside him. “The reports left out some key information. It made me doubt their accuracy.”
It was the sly gleam in his eye that made Nesryn angle her head. “What, exactly, did they fail to mention?”
They reached the great hall, empty save for a cloaked figure just barely visible on the other side of the fire pit—and someone sitting beside her.
But Sartaq turned to her, examining her from head to toe and back again. There was little that he missed. “They didn’t mention that you’re beautiful.”
Nesryn opened and closed her mouth in what she was sure was an unflattering impression of a fish on dry land.
With a wink, Sartaq strode ahead, calling, “Ej.” The rukhin’s term for mother, he’d told her this morning. Nesryn hurried after him. They rounded the massive fire pit, the figure sitting atop the uppermost stair pulling back her hood.
She’d expected an ancient crone, bent with age and toothless.
Instead, a straight-backed woman with braided, silver-streaked onyx hair smiled grimly at Sartaq. And though age had indeed touched her features … it was Borte’s face. Or Borte’s face in forty years.
The hearth-mother wore a rider’s leathers, though her dark blue cloak—actually a jacket she’d left hanging over her shoulders—covered much of them.
But at her side … Falkan. His face equally grave, those dark sapphire eyes scanning them. Sartaq checked his pace at the sight of the merchant, either irritated that he hadn’t been first to claim her attention or simply that the merchant was present for this reunion.