Blackdog by K. V. Johansen

Author:K. V. Johansen
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781616145217
Publisher: Pyr
Published: 2011-09-20T06:00:00+00:00

You'll come home soon, Attalissa. We both know it. I'm waiting for you.

Even in sleep, in unconsciousness, or wide awake in the midst of utter confusion, when his mind came seeking her in last week's winter storm—the tent whipping free of its stakes, ropes snapping—she was protected. The hand of Sayan sheltered her, and the rush of Kinsai's fervent blood. There was nothing for the wizard to see of Pakdhala, nothing for him to grasp or recognize as his searching brushed by and went on, lost in hills and river.

But the wizard had never spoken before in all the times that he had sought her.

Pakdhala woke to the grip of a hand on her shoulder and blinked up to see Bikkim crouched beside her. The first yellow light slanted through the narrow slit of a window to gild his skin, throwing the interwoven blue and red horses of his tattoos into sharp contrast.

“Am I late? Sorry.” She didn't think she was, not by the light, but she felt a heavy lethargy on her, as though all her bones were granite. Waking came difficult here in Serakallash, and Tamghat's words still stuck cloying to her mind. Come home soon.

“No, it's early,” Bikkim whispered, and Pakdhala rubbed her eyes, to see Immerose and Tihmrose still soundly sleeping. Immerose, for once, was not snoring.

“The boss isn't up yet. I was going to pray, and…” Bikkim shrugged, as though trying to make the words of no account. “I wondered if you'd want to come with me.”

“To the spring?”

“Yes,” he said soberly. Bikkim's dark eyes were sunken, shadowed as though he had not slept. Perhaps he did not, these nights before he went to pray to Sera. Pakdhala did not know. She missed a lot when they were in Serakallash.

“Of course.”

Neither Tihmrose nor Immerose stirred as she finished dressing, taking a scarf to wrap over her face once they were out in the street, as Bikkim did to hide his Serakallashi tattoos. There was always an excuse, dust or, now, the cold, to make a covered face not so very odd. It was the tail end of winter, the wind still biting, carrying cold from the north. Some mornings there would be hoarfrost around the wells, and a fog rising from the water, frost on the outside of their water-gourds and the big goatskins, the shaggy camels puffing clouds. It was the season when clouds could cover the desert skies, and snow would fall, which Pakdhala never realized she missed until it was there, touching her skin, hushing the world, covering the hills and the dunes with glittering white until, in a day or a week, it sank away into the waiting earth, feeding the wells and the holy springs with water to last until the next year. Snowfall had set this year's three leggy calves frisking, gleefully mad with the strangeness of it. She felt the same each time it snowed, as though the world might be made new.

But today there would be sun for their departure.

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