Free Lords of Grass and Thunder by Curt Benjamin Page B

in their saddles, they urged their horses to a swaggering gait past rows of round white tents. Yesugei, however, watched him with a sharp eye that didn’t escape Mergen’s notice.
    He was pretty sure that plain dumb luck had brought the prince and the girl together. But the shaman business had to stop. She’d be no use to him at all with a rattle and a drum in her hand.

Chapter Six
     
    “ E LUNEKE! COME AWAY FROM the door!” Toragana’s high, sharp voice called from inside the tent.
    “Coming!” Eluneke answered. Her teacher expected prompt obedience, but still she lingered on the doorsill, watching the bold young lords as they galloped up the wide avenue.
    “What is it, girl?” They had no customers that afternoon, so Toragana had come to the door in her everyday coats with a wide apron covering everything from shoulders to ankles. She set a motherly hand on Eluneke’s shoulder and craned her neck to discover what her protégée found so interesting. “What did you see?”
    Eluneke wanted to answer truthfully, but the truths that vied for release on her tongue confused her. “A dead man,” she said, though the same voice said to her heart: “My husband.”
    “Did you recognize him?” Toragana asked. “Only the sky knows what uneasy spirits have followed the armies down from the mountains. Does Chimbai-Khan himself wander among his tents? Bolghai did what he could, but I have never been satisfied that the khan’s soul rested easy. He had unfinished business with the lady who murdered him.”
    The questions didn’t surprise Eluneke. Shaman, who stood guard at the gate to the underworld, regularly talked with the dead. When Eluneke’s fosterers had apprenticed her to Toragana, she had already begun to receive such visitations. Her answer was more problematic, however.
    “I never saw him before.”
    Toragana narrowed her eyes and peered down the avenue. “Was it a hunting accident?”
    The boy, she meant. Eluneke shook her head. “I think it will be murder.”
    “Will be. And murder, no less. Oh, my. I wonder who it could be?” The shaman tugged at her sleeve, drawing Eluneke into the tent they shared as student and teacher.
    “I’ve been able to see the spirits of the dead since I was little,” Eluneke objected. She didn’t understand Toragana’s urgency over this boy—she hadn’t even told her the husband part yet.
    “I know, I know.” Toragana patted her hand and began to pace. “The spirits pay a great deal less attention to the niceties of past and future than the living do,” she explained, thinking it through for herself at the same time. “Still, it’s very unusual for an apprentice who hasn’t found her totem yet to have such sensitivity to the dead, let alone the not-dead-yet. Let me think.”
    She circled the firebox at the center of the little tent as she spoke. Past the little stool by the door for customers and patients she went, between the workbench filled with her herbs and elixirs and the chest where she stored the ingredients for the mixable potions. She paced quickly by the furs for their beds stacked at the far end of the tent, around the firebox to the door on the far side. Her robes swung on their pegs as she swept by them, around another set of chests where she kept the things they used for tea and their stores of flour and honey and sheep fat for special occasions.
    Eluneke thought her teacher was going to trip over the thick pillows scattered for sitting on the carpeted floor, but she somehow managed to avoid them—and the brooms hanging from the lattices on strings of sinew—without looking up from her frowning concentration. As her thoughts grew more troubled, however, Toragana circled more quickly. The little mirrors hanging from the spokes of the round ceiling to keep away evil spirits swung wildly in her wake, and Eluneke thought she could see the old carpets growing thinner with each pass.
    Just as she thought her teacher would turn into her totem animal