Arrows of the Sun by Judith Tarr Page A

gather here. He knew that from Vanyi’s teaching.
She had not taught him as much as she knew, and at that he had kept distracting
her, but he had a little knowledge of finned folk’s ways. He eyed the stretch
of water and the dance of winged darters on its surface, and, keenly, the swirl
and flash of scaled body as it struck for the kill.
    One of the treasures from Vanyi’s silken parcel was like
enough to the darters to please his eye. He mated the line with the delicate
weaving of thread and down and hidden, deadly hook.
    Foolishness, the forester would have decreed. So had
Estarion once, and been proved false a dozen times over.
    He cast the line with its lure as Vanyi had taught him. The
breeze was fitful but strong enough to lift the false darter and tangle it in
branches, where it would catch nothing but curses. The brush of his magery
lifted it from certain capture and sent it winging out over the water, to
settle among its mortal kin.
    The fish took their time in coming to the lure. Estarion let
them. The sun was warm, the air was sweet. No one came to trouble him, no
squire bent on duty, no tribe of lordlings questing for mischief. He cast his
line, he drew it in, he cast again. Some of the shadows beneath the water had
begun to draw nearer, circling, closing for the strike.
    “There!”
    Estarion jumped nigh out of his skin. The lure sprang out of
the water. Living silver arced after it, fell short, vanished with a scornful
flick of tail.
    He whipped about. “You thrice-begotten son of a leprous—”
    It was not Godri, nor any of the hellions who rode with him.
It was not any face he knew.
    “You jump,” the stranger said, “like a plainsbuck in rut.”
    Estarion’s mouth was open. He shut it. “That was my dinner,”
he said. Calmly. All things considered.
    “This?” The stranger drew in Estarion’s line with cool and
perfect insolence, and inspected the damp and draggled thing on the end of it.
“Little enough meat on these bones.”
    “Were you born a fool,” Estarion asked, “or did you study to
become one?”
    “Clearly you were born rude.” The stranger cast the line
long and low and level, as a darter flew. It barely brushed the surface of the
water.
    Silver flashed. Line snapped taut. “There,” said the
stranger, but softly, almost tenderly. “There now.”
    Estarion stared at the fish flopping and gasping at his
feet. Blank bliss had transmuted into blank rage, and thence into plain
blankness.
    The stranger was a woman, he realized with a small but
penetrating shock. It was not obvious. She was whipcord-thin, dressed in
ancient hunting leathers, hair plaited as simply as a priest’s, although she
wore no torque. Her nose was as fierce an arch as his own, her skin as
velvet-dark, but her eyes were northern eyes, black in white, under brows as
white as the flash of her teeth when she grinned at him.
    She was old: and that too was not immediately obvious, for
all the whiteness of her hair. Her skin was stretched taut over the haughty
bones. She still had her teeth, and she carried herself like a young thing,
with a light, arrogant grace that raised his hackles and set his pride to
spitting.
    She brought in another fish as quickly as the first, with
ease that was like contempt. “You are a witch,” he said.
    “Oh, yes,” said the stranger. “But here I’m a fisherman.”
    “Woman,” Estarion said. His tone was nasty.
    “You’re jealous,” she said. “Touchy, too. Here’s enough for
your dinner and mine. Where’s your gratitude?”
    “I’d have had my own dinner if you hadn’t helped me out of
it.”
    “And whose fault was that? This isn’t milady’s fishpond,
where any idiot can drop a line in peace. There’s a fair to middling army over
yonder, and rakehells enough in it, and here are you, as if there was never a
danger in the world.”
    “There isn’t,” he said.
    “I walked right up to you. What if I’d been minded to stick
a knife in you?”
    “I’d have