Free Sun Wolf 1 - The Ladies Of Mandrigyn by Barbara Hambly

have goats who could work better magic than you.” He remembered the shaman’s offended sniff—because, of course, his father was right.
    And he remembered the awful agony of thirst.
    The dream changed. Cool hands touched his face and raised the rim of a cup to his lips. The metal was ice-cold, like the water in the cup. As he drank, he opened swollen eyelids to look into the face of the amber-eyed girl. The fear that widened her eyes told him he was awake.
    I tried to kill her,
    
     he thought cloudily. But she tried to kill me—or did she? His memory was unclear. Mixed with the perfume of her body, he could smell the salt flavor of the sea; the creak of wood and cordage and the shift of the bed where he lay told him he was aboard a ship. The girl’s eyes were full of fear, but her arm beneath his head was soft. She raised the cup to his cracked lips again, and he drained it. He tried to stammer thanks but could not speak—tried to ask her why she had wanted to kill him.
    Abruptly, Sun Wolf slid into sleep again.
    The dreams were worse, a terrifying nightmare of racking, helpless pain. He had a tangled vision of darkness and wind and rock, of being trapped and left prey to things he could not see, of dangling over a tossing abyss of change and loss and terrible loneliness. In the darkness, demons seemed to ring him—demons that he alone could see, as he had always been able to see them, though to others—his father, the other men of the tribe, even the shaman—they had been only vague voices and a sense of terror. Once he seemed to see, small and clear and distant, the school of Wrynde, shabby and deserted beneath the sluicing rain, with only the old warrior who looked after the place in the troop’s absence sweeping the blown leaves from the training floor with a broom of sticks. The smell and feel of the place cried to him, so real that he could almost touch the worn cedar of the pillars and hear the wailing of the wind around the rocks. Then the vision vanished in a shrieking storm of fire, and he was lost in spinning darkness that cut at him like swords, pulling him closer and closer to a vortex of silent pain.
    Then that, too, faded, and there was only white emptiness that blended slowly to exhausted waking. He lay like a hollowed shell cast up on a beach, scoured by sun and salt until there was nothing left, cold to the bone and so weary that he ached. He could not find the strength to move, but only stared at the timbers above his head, listening to the creak and roll of the ship and the slap of water against the hull, feeling the sunlight that lay in a small, heatless bar over his face.
    They were in full ocean, he judged, and heading fast before the wind.
    He remembered the mountains of clouds, standing waiting on the horizon. If the storms hit and the ship went to pieces now, he would never have the strength to swim.
    So if would be the crabs, after all.
    But that cold, calm portion of his mind, the part that seemed always to be almost detached from his physical body, found neither strength nor anger in that thought. It didn’t matter—nothing mattered. The sway of the ship moved the chip of sunlight back and forth across his face, and he found that he lacked the strength even to wonder where he was—or care.
    An hour passed. The sunlight traveled slowly down the blanket that covered his body and lay like a pale, glittering shawl over the foot of the bunk. Like the blink of light from a sword blade, the chased gold rim of the empty cup on the table beside him gleamed faintly in the moving shadows. Footsteps descended a hatch somewhere nearby, then came down the hall.
    The door opposite his feet opened, and Sheera Galernas stepped in.
    Not the President of Kedwyr, after all, he thought, still with that eerie sense of unconcern.
    She regarded him impassively from the doorway for a moment, then stepped aside. Without a word, four women filed in behind her, dressed as she was, for traveling in dark,