vainglory, though her expectations were more modest: an inexhaustible supply of cabra melons and red beads.
The trio tried to infect him with their enthusiasm, calling him an old man when he resisted. They had a point. Pavek could remember himself at Ruari’s age—it wasn’t more than a handful of years ago—and he’d been a cautious old man even then.
After dealing with the sorcerer-king’s boredom, Pavek feared his greatest challenge was going to be riding herd on his rambunctious allies.
Ruari had matured in the past year. He had moments of blind, adolescent stubbornness, but overall Pavek trusted the half-elf to act sensibly and hold up under pressure. Zvain was still very young, in the midst of his most willful and rebellious years, and nursing childhood wounds. He was inclined at times to crumble, to curl in on himself—especially when Pavek and Ruari lapsed into one of their vigorous but ultimately inconsequential arguments. The boy craved affection that Pavek could barely provide and then frequently rejected it just as fast, which only made life more difficult.
As for Mahtra… the made-woman was an enigma. Younger than Zvain by several years, she wasn’t so much a child—though she had a child’s notion of cause and effect—as a wild creature, full-grown and unpredictable. She was much stronger than she appeared, and, or so she claimed, had the capacity to ‘protect herself’.
Mahtra said she’d ridden out of Khelo, the market village most nearly aligned with Quraite’s true location and the one where Lord Hamanu maintained his kank stables. But Pavek held to the Quraite tradition of entering Urik from a deceptive direction.
They circled the city, camping one final night on the barrens, and joined the city’s southern road shortly after dawn the next morning.
That was the limit of caution or discretion. Once the bright, belled kanks were on the road, rumor traveled with them through the irrigated fields. Pavek spotted the isolated dust plumes as runners spread the word, and before long there were gawkers on the byways. They kept their distance, of course, even the noble ladies in their distinctive gauze-curtained howdahs, but curiosity was the strongest mortal emotion and a parade of the Lion-King’s decorated bugs was almost as fascinating as the Lion himself. Pavek, Ruari, and Zvain were nothing to look at, but Mahtra, the eleganta with her stark white skin and unusually masked features, captured the onlookers’ attention. She certainly did when they reached Modekan, the village where, in the past, Quraiters had registered their intent to bring zarneeka into Urik the following day.
Pavek had no idea what day it was as they approached Modekan, but the village was quiet. The Modekan registrators weren’t expecting visitors, at least not visitors riding the sorcerer-king’s kanks. Pavek began to regret his decision to pass through Modekan, where their impending arrival had all the earmarks of the event of the year, if not the decade.
He counted nineteen frantic clangs of the village gong before they arrived; within the city walls, even the appearance of Lord Hamanu only warranted ten.
Every village templar was lined up at the gate, wearing tattered, wrinkled yellow robes that would never pass muster at Pavek’s old barracks. The rest of Modekan mobbed behind the line, necks craning and heads bobbing for a good look. Three strides through the gate, and every pair of eyes was fastened tight on Mahtra. A burly human woman with a bit more weaving in her yellow sleeve than the others hurried forward to crouch beside Mahtra’s kank, offering her own back as a dismounting platform. Mahtra’s bird’s-egg eyes fairly bulged with surprise, and rather than dismounting, she pulled her feet up onto the saddle.
It was an insult, a breach of tradition. Pavek didn’t imagine that registrators liked being treated as kank-furniture—regulators certainly didn’t—but having humiliated oneself, no low-rank templar like to be refused. Confusion reigned and threatened to turn ugly with the village’s ranking templar groveling in the dust and Mahtra trying to keep her balance. Pavek had his eye particularly focused on another templar in the crowd, young enough and angry enough to be the crouched woman’s son, who’d turned a dangerous shade of red.
When the furious templar began to move, Pavek moved as well, dismounting in the war bureau style—off leg swinging forward over the pommel, rather than backward over the cantle, so the rider landed with the kank at his back and eyes on his enemy. He’d seen the method, but never tried it before. Success made him bold.
“Who’s in charge here?” he