The Ladies Of Mandrigyn by Barbara Hambly

Author:Barbara Hambly
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2012-04-23T20:39:19+00:00

Chapter 12

Sun Wolf paused in his pacing, hearing the sound of soft, approaching footfalls in the darkness. From the stairs, he thought. His sigh was deep and bored, and he shifted his weight as a man would do on a long stint of guard. The pattering steps halted. Around him, the vast, chilly darkness was lambent with breath.

Somewhere a board creaked. Then weight struck his shoulders and the back of his knee—light, muscled weight, like a cat’s, vicious and controlled. At the first breath of impact, he twisted, slithering free of the smooth arms that sought his neck. In the darkness, he reached back and expertly tweaked the short little nose that snorted with exertion so close to his ear.

He felt his assailant step away. With an oily hiss of hot metal, someone uncovered a dark-lantern. Behind him, Gilden stood panting, regarding him with injured chagrin.

All around the room, their hair tight-braided and their smooth arms traced in the shadows with the faint, clear lines of muscle definition, the ladies of Mandrigyn watched him, a sea of aggrieved eyes.

“You’re pulling with your shoulders,” he told Gilden, looking down into those long-lashed, sea-blue eyes. “Your center of balance is lower than a man’s—that’s why you women have hell’s own time throwing each other. It’s one of your advantages against a man. Throw from the hips—like this—lever me down. Somebody your size, trying to use brute force against someone my size, is more than stupid—she’s suicidal.”

Gilden colored, but said, “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

“And I heard you coming.”

She said something else then, sotto voce and obviously picked up from Crazyred’s vocabulary.

He glanced at the assembled ladies. “Next?”

Behind him, he heard Gilden’s swift hiss of intaken breath, a voiceless protest. When he turned and raised one shaggy brow at her, she asked, “Couldn’t I try again?”

“No,” he said gently, “because you had only one chance, and now you’re dead. Go sit down.”

She returned without a word to her place on the edge of one of the upturned tree tubs between Wilarne and her daughter, Tisa. Sun Wolf, for the tenth time so far that evening, walked over to the little potting room that opened off the main orangery, so that he would neither see nor hear—supposedly—where his next assailant would begin her attack. The single dark-lantern that illuminated the vast room threw his shadow, huge and grotesque and swaying, across the gray boards of the wall; he heard Denga Rey fuss with the lantern slide and curse when she scorched her fingers. As he closed the door behind him, he heard the soft rise of talk. Gilden, glib as always, had informed him that this was to cover any noise that the next attacker might make in taking her place, but Sun Wolf suspected that it was simply because the women liked to talk.

It was something he’d found was true even of Starhawk, though there wasn’t a man in the troop who’d believe that. So far as he knew, he was the only

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