Suelen (Tuyo Book 5) Read online

  SUELEN

  Tuyo: Book 5

  Rachel Neumeier

  © 2022 by Rachel Neumeier

  All Rights Reserved

  Cover art © 2022 by Trif Book Design

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any person living or dead is strictly your imagination.

  Contents

  1 –

  2 –

  3 –

  4 –

  5 –

  6 –

  7 –

  8 –

  9 –

  10 –

  11 –

  12 –

  Endnotes

  Death’s Lady: The Year’s Midnight excerpt

  Acknowledgments

  Other Works by Rachel Neumeier

  1 –

  Suelen Haras Soyauta, Second Prelate of the Order of Surgeons Dedicat and Third Prelate of the Order of Physicians Dedicat, for fifty-five years a highly regarded instructor of the Royal University of Avaras and for eighteen years personal physician to the king of the summer country, checked his horse halfway up the snowy slope that led from the river into the immense forest of the winter country. He sat quite still in the saddle for a good five minutes, possibly more, gazing into the frozen green shadows of the forest, thinking very seriously about turning around and riding back down the slope, across the bridge that spanned the river, into the summer lands. Right through the town, to the small, bright, temporary city of silken luxury that housed the king of the summer country and those members of his household and court who had accompanied him on that grueling ride from Avaras to this far northern border.

  It wasn’t pride that stopped him. Not only pride. But if Suelen could have changed his mind without encountering a thousand colleagues and servants plus one extremely satisfied cousin, all of whom would say loudly, I thank the gods you’ve thought better of your foolish notions, he might have done it.

  Soretes Aman Shavet, Regat Sul, king of the summer country, would say no such thing. For all the ferocious argument, for all the king hated to lose arguments and had hated to lose this one, Soretes would not be satisfied if Suelen retreated. He would be deeply sympathetic. That would be harder to bear. In that sympathy, Suelen would see the true reflection of his own deep failure.

  Raising his right hand, Suelen touched his coat over his heart—over the double badge stitched neatly on his shirt. Dedication to his calling kept him from turning back. Dedication and, yes, he could not deny it, probably a reasonable measure of pride as well.

  His horse, a decent bay gelding, steady and amenable, dropped its head and blew at the packed snow of the trail, then shifted its weight and swung its head about, obviously more than willing to turn back down the slope, toward the warmth of the summer country, its familiar pasture and comfortable stable. If Suelen gave the gelding its head, it would probably think, in whatever manner horses thought such things, I thank the gods you’ve thought better of your foolish notions.

  Lifting the reins, Suelen clicked his tongue and tightened his legs around the barrel of his horse. The gelding blew out another breath, but it lifted its head and strode ahead willingly enough.

  Up the slope, packed snow dingy under the horse’s hooves. To east and west, untrammeled snow brilliant in the sunlight. Ahead, big, close-crowded conifers of one sort or another, needled branches bending below heavy burdens of snow, so that as Suelen passed into the forest, the light of the Sun became dappled, fleeting, uncertain.

  The path remained clear, at least. A few thousand mounted soldiers riding through this forest had left a very clear trail. A little snow had fallen since that mad ride, but not enough to cover over the signs of the many soldiers who had ridden out.

  Some of those soldiers had returned. But far too many had died, some of wounds taken during the brief battle, but many more of the falling cold that had ended the struggle.

  Any battlefield was terrible, as Suelen well knew. But there was a different kind of horror in a death that came so fast and so silently; that could not be fought by any skill; that fell across the whole of the battlefield, irresistible, remorseless. Those who had gotten clear would never forget the terror of that breakneck ride, horses at a dead gallop, man and beast desperate to get out from under the great cold before it fell across them all. Certainly Suelen would remember that ride forever.

  The king had handled the aftermath with grim efficiency.

  Soretes hated sending men to their deaths, hated leading men to their deaths, despised particularly any losses that came from stupidity and lack of planning for predictable contingencies. The king had foreseen the possibility that his own small army might be taken by Lord Lorellan, swept up in the madness of deep enthrallment. Though Soretes had planned for success, he had also planned for failure. The king had led his men into the winter country in the hope that Lord Lorellan could be defeated there, but he had been prepared to retreat and face the mad sorcerer in the summer country.

  But he had not planned for the falling of the deadly cold. For all that this great act of Ugaro magic had decisively ended Lord Lorellan’s domination of the battlefield and his life, setting unexpected victory into the hands of the king, Soretes blamed himself for the losses that had accompanied that victory. The warning had come so abruptly and so late that fewer than half his people had responded fast enough, galloping south with all the speed their horses could manage. Even of those, some at the rear had fallen, men and horses alike struck dead by the cold in midstride before they even struck the frozen earth.

  Of those who could not or would not flee, only a paltry few had survived; a scattering of men who had thrown down their weapons and appealed to the Ugaro for help. A startling number of Ugaro had apparently answered that appeal, but still, so terribly few Lau soldiers had been spared. Many of those had returned to the summer country. But a handful had not: too badly wounded to travel the day’s journey from battlefield to river. That was why Suelen rode north now through the great forest.

  The trees seemed less closely crowded once Suelen passed between those at the edge of the forest and rode into their shade, but they also seemed to loom higher. The cold was much more intense beneath that shade, or seemed so. Suelen could not forbear a glance upward, seeking the blue of the sky and the reassurance of the Sun past the green and white of the layered branches.

  Strange how needled conifers grew both in the frigid cold of the winter country and in the dry upland hills in parts of the summer lands. This puzzling fact had not struck him before, and he turned it over in his mind now. True, the pines of the dry hills, comparatively sparse of branch and needle, did not closely resemble these majestic spruces and firs. Still, the similarity must reveal something of the nature of the world, and thus something of the desires of the gods who had fashioned every land that stretched out beneath the Sun. The observation, as every observation regarding the world and its creatures, was certainly worthy of notice and thought.

  Also, the puzzle might turn his thoughts aside, for a little while, from the anxiety of his journey.

  Thinking of that anxiety did not help at all. Suelen urged his horse to take a faster pace. Urgency pressed him; the certainty that men suffered and died while he traveled. But that was not the only reason he leaned forward. If he did not press ahead and get out of sight of the open land behind him, with the silver ribbon of the river below and the lush green of the borderlands rising up beyond that, he might well yield to every kind of unease and turn back.

  An hour or two or perhaps three later, Suelen rode out of the forest and across a wide open space that was probably a meadow during the short summer of the winter country. Its grasses might be hidden now beneath a blanket of snow and ice, but still, he drew rein in the welcome sunlight.
The warmth of the Sun was by no means as intense here as in the summer lands. That was a puzzle too, though so familiar a truth of the world that few men ever wondered at it. A woman, with so much more leisure for thought than a man, might devote more time to consider such wide puzzles. Ketharathi Lady Pasolaun had written a recent treatise regarding the question, which Suelen had glanced through, though he had not yet had time to read it.

  The lady had not written the treatise under her own name, of course. Ladies signed their husbands’ names to their works, with only the little dots below the signature line that signified his wife. But even if a careless glance missed those dots, no one would ever believe that Lord Pasolaun, estimable as he might be, had ever taken a moment to wonder about the natural world or what it revealed regarding the desires of the gods. The man’s attention was taken up entirely with political maneuvering, as anyone even adjacent to the broader court must be aware. Pasolaun’s wife was wholly responsible for her husband’s name appearing on so many intriguing papers related to natural history.

  Whatever reasons the gods might have to order the world as they did, the lesser warmth of the Sun in the winter lands was certainly uncomfortable for a Lau. Even frightening. Yet despite the chill, the bright sunlight was a comfort. Suelen could not help but keep his gelding to a slower pace, lingering below the open sky a little longer. He could not help but look ahead, to the place where the trail of hard-packed snow ran back into the forest, with some slight trepidation.

  Then he saw the Ugaro warriors, and the trepidation became true fear.

  Three Ugaro. No, four. No, five—six. Possibly more than six. Until they moved, they were hard to see in the dappled light beneath those trees. They had chosen to let him see them; Suelen realized that after the first moment. Definitely warriors. Almost all Ugaro men were warriors, that was Suelen’s understanding; and all these men carried bows in their hands or over their shoulders. As they came out into the light, he saw that all but one had a sword slung over his back or at his hip.

  None of them had drawn a sword. None of them needed to. If these warriors wanted to kill a Lau who had ventured out of his own country and trespassed into theirs, they could feather him with arrows, or cut his throat with a knife, or beat him to death with their bare hands.

  If they chose, they could stake a Lau out in the snow and take their time killing him. Such things had occasionally happened during the past few years. If Suelen had somehow failed to realize that, any number of his colleagues had pointed it out. His cousin Piranes had not. His cousin had at least done Suelen the basic courtesy of declining to warn him of the obvious.

  If these Ugaro warriors chose to kill him, Suelen had no way to prevent them. That had been true nearly from the moment he’d ridden across the bridge from the summer lands into the winter country. He would not even be able to argue on his own behalf; he did not speak taksu, and very few Ugaro warriors spoke darau.

  He had understood that he took this risk when he headed north. He had also known perfectly well that understanding a risk in theory probably wouldn’t be quite the same as facing it in the present moment. Now he found that indeed, it was not remotely similar.

  Still, as yet the Ugaro did not seem inclined toward savagery. They looked at Suelen with the unreadable calm of so many wolves, but none of them lifted a bow or drew a sword or a knife. Lord Gaur, to whom the king had granted the final decision regarding Suelen’s mission, had seemed quite confident the Ugaro would not kill Suelen immediately. It seemed Lord Gaur had been right. As perhaps one might expect, given that he was—as had finally been revealed beyond any possible denial—an extremely powerful sorcerer.

  Given that assurance, Suelen should not fear immediate, brutal death. A rational man should be able to set that fear aside.

  He had drawn up his horse the moment he had spotted the Ugaro. Now he took a breath, let it out, took one more second to glance up at the brilliant Sun and frame a silent prayer, and sent his gelding forward. He rode directly across the meadow, brought his horse to a halt again about twelve feet in front of the warriors, and dismounted. All without hesitation, because if he hesitated he would probably flinch, and if he flinched he might try to retreat, even turn and flee south, and even if the Ugaro let him go, that would be utterly humiliating. Not to mention utterly useless to the men he had come here to help.

  From this close, especially now that Suelen was on foot, the Ugaro warriors looked even more intimidating than they had from a distance. Short, to be sure. That did not make them look less dangerous. They were built broad and stocky, heavy bones and powerful muscles discernable despite a generous layer of subcutaneous fat. That would be one reason they could stand comfortably clad in such light clothing. Their clothing seemed mostly made of wool. Undyed. Tawny, because that was the color of the wooly cattle of the winter country. Some of them also wore garments made of leather, brown or tan or bleached near-white. He saw fur linings for boots, yes, but no mail, not even the layered linen gambesons worn by Lau soldiers. That seemed surprising. Suelen would have thought wool might serve as well as linen for such protection, and certainly he would have expected that the warmth of such cloth armor might be welcome. Evidently not. These warriors wore nothing that would hamper movement. One man, a little to the fore of the rest, wore a sleeveless shirt and equally sleeveless vest, plus several broad silver armbands on one arm. Difficult to believe he did not feel the cold, but he stood relaxed and apparently comfortable in this frigid clearing.

  Suelen had read a paper once that declared that an Ugaro submerged in water would sink rather than float. Studying these warriors now, he thought that might be true. Muscle was a dense tissue, and these men were certainly heavily muscled. A blow from one of these warriors would probably land like the kick of a mule. Round, fleshy faces, narrow eyes, small noses and mouths … difficult to read their expressions. Not smiling, not frowning. Hair braided or left loose, absolutely straight rather than the tight curl of a Lau’s hair. But thick, and glossy as a blackbird’s wing—good diets there. All of them had one or a few or several beads of red-dyed bone braided into their hair, the number and pattern varying, though his surgeon’s eye sorted these men more quickly by scars and other signs of minor injuries. Or not so minor; even through fat and muscle, Suelen saw the telltale knotting along the arm of the man wearing silver instead of sleeves, and winced inwardly at that echo of an injury that must, long ago, have driven through flesh and cleaved half through the bone. That wound had obviously received adequate treatment; otherwise the man would have lost much of the use of that arm. Evidence of that level of competence among Ugaro healers was both surprising and reassuring.

  None of the others wore silver. Or not as much, nor as obviously. And the one man stood to the front. Suelen focused on that one, dropped the reins of his horse, walked forward the small distance necessary, and knelt, bowing his head. This was uncomfortable. He had never knelt to any man but Soretes, and then only once. He did it now because Lord Gaur had been most forceful when explaining the importance of respecting Ugaro customs and manners when speaking to Ugaro warriors.

  Then Suelen pronounced, very carefully, four of the taksu sentences he had so painstakingly memorized and practiced: “I ask to tend those wounded in the great battle. I am a respected healer. Lord Gaur asks that you permit this. I do not speak taksu.”

  There was no taksu word for surgeon. Nor for physician. The taksu word surena, healer, meant something like the general term mediciner, but even that word might not be a close synonym. So Lord Gaur had explained. He had corrected Suelen’s pronunciation until, he said, any reasonable effort would ensure an Ugaro understood him. He had taught him a few other sentences as well, with the dry observation that Suelen might need them: I beg your pardon; I did not mean to offend, and Please, I ask the lord of the inKera to judge this matter. Suelen had memorized those as well. Though he fervently hoped he would manage to avoid giving offense to anyone, the Ugaro had a reputation as a touchy, quick-tempered people, and
Lord Gaur had warned Suelen again that this reputation was well deserved.

  The man with the silver armbands did not seem particularly volatile. He spoke to Suelen, slowly and carefully. Suelen might have caught a word—wounded men. Or perhaps it was a different word; he was not certain. He repeated, striving for the correct pronunciation, “I do not speak taksu.” Then he waited, looking up cautiously, trying to gauge the reactions of this warrior, of all these warriors.

  The man wearing the silver turned his head a fraction and spoke to his companions. For some moments, one warrior spoke, and then another, and then yet another. No one raised his voice. No one spoke over anyone else. No one cut in or interrupted. No one gestured either; all the Ugaro stood still and spoke quietly, in measured tones. The quiet manner of these men was almost as different from Lau as their stocky build or their long, straight hair or their skin the color of old ivory.

  Then two of the men went past Suelen to his gelding, and another turned and walked back into the forest in the direction from which they’d come, and the man with the silver armbands met Suelen’s eyes, touched his fingertips to his own chest, and said, slowly and carefully, “Varoya inYoraro.”

  Not inKera. That was a surprise; Suelen knew—he had been told—this was inKera territory. But then, many Ugaro tribes had been drawn into that last, intense battle against Lord Lorellan. He knew that too.

  Lord Gaur had spoken highly of the inKera. He hadn’t mentioned the inYoraro at all. That made Suelen feel uneasy. But he could hardly refuse to speak to this inYoraro warrior. He said, touching his own chest, “Suelen Haras Soyauta.” He also rose to his feet, framing the useful taksu phrase I beg your pardon; I did not mean to offend in his mind in case this proved to be a mistake. He turned, too, worried for his gelding, and blinked, seeing one of the Ugaro warriors holding his horse’s head while the other opened the saddlebags to look within.