Free No Quarter by Tanya Huff Page A

there, but he never tried to be where she was. She could think around him and be reasonably certain he wouldn't become tangled in the thoughts.
    Tucked into the thick window embrasure, Vree stared out over the Citadel wall and down at the city, her hands busy with a dagger and whetstone, needing no guidance after so many edges. If she wanted to leave, they couldn't keep her. She was small enough to fit out of the window, and the jump to the top of the wall—her lip curled—would be less than challenging. The wall itself would be ridiculously easy to descend.
    And then what?
    Until Gyhard, Bannon had been the one person in her life. There was the army
    —a living, breathing, single creature—there were targets, and there was Bannon.
    Occasionally, bits of the army would become more separate than other bits—Emo had almost become a person—but it never lasted. Anyone outside the army was lumped under "other" and forgotten.
    She'd had to notice Gyhard; he'd been wearing Bannon's body. Then there'd suddenly been Karlene, just when she needed a hand and Bannon's no longer reached for her. Now, there was Magda, who so desperately wanted to help she was next to impossible not to trust. Three people to take the place of Bannon and an army___
    From a room higher in the four-story building, Vree could hear a voice lifted in song. From the other end of her floor, two instruments clashed, sorted themselves out, and began to make music. A breeze lifted her hair off her forehead, and Vree slipped down off the windowsill and inside. If the bards were going to watch her with the kigh, she wasn't going to make it easy for them.
    Slipping the dagger into its sheath, Vree caught sight of her reflection in the blade and suddenly wondered if the sifting of her past originated with her or with Gyhard. Was it the situation that drove her to self-discovery or was it him?
    *Hey.*
    *Hey, what?* he answered and her awareness of his presence grew.
    *Are you messing around in my head?*
    *I wouldn't think of it.* She saw the memory of his smile as he spoke. Bannon's smile. No. Bannon's face. Gyhard's smile. *I'm leaving everything exactly as I found it.*
    *Liar.*
    The bittersweet sense of inevitability accompanying that single word closed off further conversation.
    There were a number of things Gyhard wanted to say, but he couldn't, not without letting Vree know that he had access to more of her thoughts than she realized. Perhaps her need to consolidate her identity did come from him, he had no way of being sure.
    He'd seen a man once who'd fallen from a bridge and broken his neck. Against all odds he'd lived, even though the closest thing around to a healer was the village midwife. The man could see and hear and speak, but he couldn't move or do anything with the body he wore. Gyhard had wondered at the time how he'd kept from going mad.
    He found himself wondering it again.
    The bardic touching, the tracing of his boundaries, had left him restless.
    Strengthening his sense of self was quite probably the most dangerous thing they could do. He wanted…
    He wanted Vree. To hold her. To love her. To be held by her. To be loved by her.
    He wanted them to be able to make a future together. Whether death would eventually have a part in that future, he wasn't sure.
    It had been enough just to be with her.
    Had been. Now, he wanted a body of his own.

    And this is after only one day of poking about at us . Carefully, he reached out and touched Vree's memory of the moment she dragged him back from oblivion.
    She'd been willing at that instant to do anything rather than lose him. He was trying very hard to do the same.
    "Well, can you do it?"
    Magda carefully anchored the scroll she'd been studying, one hand resting lightly on a faded line drawing of a caraway plant. Talent made up only a very small part of being a healer and healer's apprentices spent a lot of their evenings in the library. She twisted lithely until she could look the Bardic Captain in the