Page 33 of The Sorcerer's Alpha

“Hm,” Tsetseg said, the deep lines of her face creasing further with satisfaction. Sycamore should have driven a harder bargain, then. Well, it didn’t matter. “Agreed. You’ll stay as our guests until the work is done. You may sleep in Chimeg’s tent.” She transferred her gaze to Marut. “And your companion will sleep with the bachelors.”

Sycamore’s stomach dropped. He didn’t want to be separated from Marut. “We prefer to stay together.”

“Are you married?”

“No,” Sycamore said, too taken aback to lie.

She shook her head. “I’m told you’re an omega. I keep a respectable camp, and I won’t have it said I let an unbonded omega get himself into trouble under my roof. I don’t know how things are done in Chedi, but that’s how it’s done here.”

If Sycamore had expected deference, he would clearly find none here. Tsetseg saw him as simply another hedge wizard, someone who could perform specific tasks, useful and respected but no more so than a skilled hunter or a midwife. There were no sorcerers past the Koramandi.

“I understand,” he said, as he had no other choice. He wondered who had sniffed him out. There were alphas everywhere, nosily smelling people.

Tsetseg smiled with the bland contentment of a woman accustomed to getting her way. “Then I have something else to offer you in trade, which you may find of some value. You spoke of Twin Rams before, and the wizard Temur.”

“I did,” Sycamore said, somewhat wary of this subject change. “Do you know him?”

“No. Twin Rams is far from here. But one of my nephews spent this past winter there with him, learning how to read the wind.”

“He is still alive?” Sycamore asked, startled. Temur had been old even when Sycamore was a child, and Sycamore had assumed he was long dead by now, all these years after he left Banuri without explanation.

“Very much so,” Tsetseg said, “unless some ill has befallen him in the past year. My nephew said he was hale and hearty.”

Temur alive, and presumably not far away. Sycamore sipped his milk to conceal his whirling thoughts. They could find shelter there, maybe—if Temur were pleased to see him. But there was no guarantee of that.

“Could you tell me,” he said slowly, “where is Twin Rams?”

CHAPTER13

Sycamore’s bath was a pot of water heating on the stove in Chimeg’s tent, and a small metal tub he crouched in to pour water over his head. The experience was a far cry from the deep soaking baths he was accustomed to in the palace, but he was so grateful to be clean that he hardly noticed the difference. He scrubbed and rinsed again and again until his skin tingled and the water he poured over him ran clear. The water in the basin was dark with grime. He hadn’t realized he was quite so filthy.

Laid out for him on one of the beds was a new suit of clothes, an unadorned dark green coat with a yellow silk sash to fit around the waist and wool trousers to wear underneath. Sarnoy clothing wasn’t much different from what the Chedoy wore, only warmer; the coat was lined with plush shearling, and the trousers were thick and felted. Even the worst storm on the steppe would seem like a balmy spring day if one was dressed in a coat like that.

Twin Rams was some distance away, two weeks or more, Tsetseg had said; and north and to the east, which was only partly the direction Sycamore wanted to travel. They would need warm clothes to make a journey like that, far across the wild steppe with only Tsetseg’s vague guidance to lead them. Find the River Chono, frozen now, and follow it downstream to Twin Rams’ camp. Sycamore could only hope the River Chono would announce itself as such.

He had no choice. He needed somewhere safe to shelter for his next heat. If seeing Temur again was painful, so be it. If Temur turned them away unaided, at least they had tried. They couldn’t last the winter on their own.

Temur had come into his life a year after he arrived in Banuri, a miserable year in which he grieved for his parents first by using his magic for willful destruction and later by refusing to use it at all. Temur’s calm, patient presence had finally drawn Sycamore from his night-black sorrow and loneliness. For four years, he was Sycamore’s teacher and friend, and then one day he announced he would depart the next morning and wouldn’t answer any of Sycamore’s questions about why. Sycamore had hated him for that for a long time, and he still carried a hard seed of resentment in his heart for how Temur had led Sycamore to love him and then abandoned him.

By the time Chimeg returned, he had dressed and set aside his old clothes for disposal in the midden heap, which was all they were fit for. She glanced at him as she came through the door, but said nothing to him until she had removed her hat and knelt before the altar opposite the entrance, painted orange and adorned with a bronze figure of the Sarnoy’s One God. Sycamore watched as she pressed her fingers to her lips and then to the statue’s feet. Then she turned to him and said, “You’ve eaten and bathed. Shall we begin?”

Sycamore considered her. She had dark hair as all the Sarnoy did, and a round face with blue eyes that revealed nothing of her thoughts. Sycamore felt that she disliked him, but perhaps he only assumed dislike based on his experiences with Chedoy sorcerers. Any palace sorcerer would have been mortally insulted to be made subordinate to another sorcerer. Sycamore thought he was much less vain than most of his compatriots, but even so he would have been somewhat irked in Chimeg’s position.

Whatever her feelings about the situation, Chimeg offered him water and a cushion to sit on with every appearance of gracious welcome. Beneath the rugs on the floor of her tent lay a removable panel that she lifted out to expose the bare ground, denuded of grass by frequent use. It was a clever way to give her access to the earth while still enjoying the warmth and privacy of the tent.

“You are looking for water?” he asked her, to confirm what Tsetseg had said.

She nodded. “Better to dig now before we need it. We return here every winter. If the well goes dry, we can’t keep our animals alive.” She laid her hand on the small patch of earth. “Let’s begin.”

Sycamore placed his hand near hers, careful not to touch her skin and lift impressions from her instead of from the ground. The earth made a hospitable murmur as it roused to him. The bedrock recognized him now, and the frozen black soil stirred long enough to welcome him into its dream, a slow winter dream of long nights and snow.

Not everything was frozen. Water sang nearby. That was the well, and below was the groundwater, also singing. Sycamore plunged through it like a diving bird, searching for a shallow or weak point that would make for easy digging.

He felt Chimeg reaching her awareness for his, seeking to join their magic for the search. Sycamore ignored her, already too focused for even a momentary interruption. He moved east, following the singing, and found a place where the soil was thinner and the water lifted toward the surface. If he were to dig a well, he would dig there.

Holding that spot in his mind, he finally reached for Chimeg and clasped her mind with his the way Temur had taught him. “Here,” he told her, and showed her, too, drawing her toward what he had found, then pulling her up through the earth to the surface to find the nearby landmarks: a single intrepid tree, a boulder split in two with the crack filled by soil.

Chimeg’s thoughts flared with surprise and suspicion. She pushed him away, and their connection broke. Sycamore blinked at her, hand still pressed to the earth, unsure what had caused her negative reaction.