Rohana’s pale face flushed with anger. She said, “Then I wonder you ever agreed to this mission! Was it only to earn your pay?”
“There was that, of course,” Kindra said, unruffled. “I am a mercenary soldier; within reason, I go where I am hired to go, and do what I am best paid to do. But there is more,” she added in a gentler tone. “The Lady Melora, your kinswoman, did not connive at her own captivity, nor choose her form of servitude. As I understand what you told me, Jalak of Shainsa-may his manhood wither! – fell upon her escort, slew her guards, and carried her away by force; wishing, for revenge or sheer lust of cruelty, to keep a leronis of the Comyn enslaved and captive as his wife-or his concubine, I am not certain.”
“In the Dry Towns there seems no great difference,” said the Lady Rohana bitterly, and Kindra nodded. “I see no very great difference anywhere, vai domna, but I do not expect you to agree with me. Be that as it may, Lady Melora was carried away into a slavery she had not chosen, and her surviving kinsmen could not, or did not, choose to avenge her.”
“There were those who tried,” Rohana said, her voice shaking. Her face was almost invisible in the darkened tent, but there were tears in her roughened voice. “They vanished without trace, until the third; he was my father’s youngest son, my half-brother; and had been Melora’s foster-brother, reared as her playmate.”
“That tale I have heard; Jalak sent back the ring he wore still on his fingers,” Kindra said, “and boasted he would do so, and more, to any other who came to avenge her. But that was ten years ago, Lady, and if I were in the Lady Melora’s slippers, I would not have lived to endanger any more of my kinfolk. If she has dwelled for twelve years in Jalak’s household, surely she cannot be in any great need, by now, of rescue. By this time, one would imagine she must be resigned to her fate.”
Rohana’s pale face stained with color. “So in truth we believed,” she said. “Cassilda pity me, I, too, reproached her in thought, wishing her dead rather than living on in Jalak’s house as a shame to us all.”
“Yet you are here now,” Kindra said, and although it was not a question, Lady Rohana answered. “You know what I am: leronis, Tower-trained; a telepath.
Melora and I dwelt together, as young girls, in the Dalereuth Tower. Neither of us chose to remain life-long, but before I left the Tower to marry, our minds were joined; we learned to reach one another’s thoughts. Then came her tragedy. In the years between, I had indeed all but forgotten; learned to think of Melora as dead, or at least gone far beyond my reach, far, far beyond my touch or my thoughts. Then-it was not more than forty days ago-Melora came to me across the distances; came to me in thought, as we had learned to do when we were little maidens in the Tower at Dalereuth. …”
Her voice was distant, strange; Kindra knew that the red-haired woman was no longer speaking to her, but to a memory; a commitment. “I hardly knew her,” Rohana said,” she had changed so greatly. Resigned to her place as Jalak’s consort and captive? No; simply unwilling to cause”-Rohana’s voice faltered-“more death and torment; I learned then that my brother, her foster-brother, had been tortured to death before her eyes, as a warning lest she seek rescue….”
Kindra grimaced with horror and revulsion. Rohana went on, steadying her voice with a fearful effort. “Melora told me that at last, after so many years, she bore a son to Jalak; that she would die before giving him an heir of Comyn blood. She did not ask rescue for herself, even then. I think-I think she wants to die. But she will not leave her other child in Jalak’s hands.”
“Another child?”
“A daughter,” Rohana said quietly, “born a few months after she was taken. Twelve years old. Old enough”-her voice shook-“old enough to be chained.” She sobbed, turning her face away. “For herself she asked nothing. Only she begged me to get her daughter away; away, out of Jalak’s hands. Only so- only so could she die in peace.”