Tarashana by Rachel Neumeier (little red riding hood ebook TXT) 📕

the water had not had time to soak into the earth. I met Rakasa’s eyes when I saw the hail. His mouth crooked. I thought we were both deciding not to mention to the Lau that sometimes the hail may be much bigger than that. That kind of hail, hurled by the force of the shiral winds, will break even Ugaro bones. That is why, if we are caught without shelter, we cover our heads with something better than only our arms, if we can.

We had lost some of the saddlebags and some of the packs, and one horse who had broken her hobbles and fled. She had not run far. She had put her foot in a hole hardly two bowshots away, and gone down so violently that the bone had not merely broken, but splintered. This was the dark bay mare that Rakasa had been riding. He put his hand over her muzzle and stroked her face and whispered to her, gently bending her head to the side to give Geras the best angle to cut the large arteries in her throat. Rakasa helped her down as the strength left her and stroked her face again, then walked back to join the rest of us. “It could have happened much farther away,” he said. “Then she would have been left alone to die like that. Wolves would have taken her, if she were lucky.”

“Yes,” I said. It was true.

“Your horses are too trusting,” he told Aras. “Even if she were hurt, an Ugaro pony would not stand like that for a man to cut her throat.”

“Yes,” Aras said gently. “I am sorry, Rakasa.”

Rakasa shrugged and walked away to see to the other horses. They would need to be saddled again, and the rest of the packs sorted out so that we knew what we still had and what we had lost. Perhaps someone far away would be surprised to find a Lau blanket or bowl where the winds finally dropped it.

Aras asked me, “Can your singers call that down as they can call down the fengol?”

I said patiently, “A singer might ask. But the gods bring down their whip as they choose.” I had seen before that the Lau, even Aras, thought that the request of a singer was like working a cantrip, though it was not at all the same.

“It would be a dangerous request,” Bara added, coming up to us. “Men and beasts may easily suffer injury or death when the shiral comes down. We have reason to be grateful that the gods did not strike so hard a blow today.”

“I see.” Aras looked thoughtful. He was probably thinking of the kind of situation where a singer might ask for the gods to bring down their whip.

I said, “Tonight, I will tell you a tale of a time when that happened. But for now, we should ride. Moving will probably help the horses settle.”

We rode slowly for the rest of that day, giving the horses time to recover and forget they had been upset. We saw nothing more alarming than a fox, which I pointed out to Suyet and Lalani. The steppe fox is paler in color and longer in the leg than the fox of the forest.

Suyet looked at the fox with interest—he was always interested in everything—and said, “A lot like the jackals of the south, but not quite the same.”

I nodded. “There is another fox we may see in the high north, different again, small, with short legs and small ears. In the warm season, it is gray, but the falling snows turn its coat white. You may have seen furs.”

Lalani, riding near us, gave me a skeptical look. “White fox, yes, Ryo, but ... the animals actually change color?”

I raised an eyebrow at her. “Weasels do that too. Ptarmigan. Rabbits. Many little beasts and birds sit in the first snow and turn whiter with every flake that falls.”

“If you say this happens, of course it must be true,” Lalani said, which is what Lau women say when they do not believe something a man says. Usually the woman makes some effort to sound sincere. Lalani did not trouble to make that effort.

I grinned at her. “If you are still in the high north when the cold season comes, you will see it is so.”

“I could almost wish to see this,” she said, a little wistfully.

“I would like to see it,” Suyet agreed. “But I suppose we’d better hope we’re not in the high north by the time the season turns.” We had been speaking sometimes in taksu and sometimes in darau, but now he switched back to taksu and said more formally, “Ryo, there is something I wonder. I do not think it is impolite to ask.”

Geras, riding near us, said, “I don’t suppose you’d care to talk in darau.”

“You should learn better taksu,” I told him, and said to Suyet, in taksu, “Ask.” To Tano, riding a little way behind me, I added, “Explain to Geras anything he does not understand.” That would improve his darau and Geras’ taksu both at once.

Suyet said cheerfully, “I’ll use little tiny words, Troop Leader. Wouldn’t want to make it too hard for you.”

Geras aimed a casual cuff at him and said in bad taksu, with some darau words mixed in, “I am very old for you young men to speak to me with disrespect.”

“I apologize, Troop Leader. I will take your blow for it if you wish,” Suyet said instantly, in faultless taksu. He had practiced that phrase.

Geras rolled his eyes. “You’ll get dirt between your teeth tonight when we spar, you know that, right?”

“I probably will,” Suyet said, not as though the prospect troubled him. He switched back to taksu and said to me, in small words, “The words fengol and shiral are not the same as