Dawnflight by Kim Iverson Headlee Page A

selected her target. The effigies were spaced to let only one horse through on either side. If neither rider pulled up, they would collide!
    Urien didn’t seem to notice the danger. His mount kept straight on course. Gyan was not about to take chances. She dropped the javelin to yank the reins with both hands. Brin slid to a stop, screaming and pawing the air. Urien cast his javelin and flashed safely through the row with the other warriors.
    He came around to fetch his weapon and saw Gyan dismount to pick up her javelin. Concern colored his face. He set spurs to his stallion’s flanks and raced toward her, babbling incoherently. She tried to assure him that she and Brin were all right, but of course words were no good. Finally, she remounted and cantered off the field. Still chattering, Urien followed.
    Though the tone of those words seemed sincere, there was something troubling in his manner that she couldn’t quite decipher.

    “I DON’T know, Cynda,” said Gyan later that evening as she prepared for bed. She pulled off the sleeveless leather battle-tunic and dropped it onto the floor beside the leggings. The undertunic followed it. Cynda offered her the white nightgown. Gyan held it to her chest, absently fingering the soft wool. “I think he’s a better swordsman. Better, even, than Per, perhaps. Yet I beat him. Per doesn’t agree with me, but I think Urien lets me win.”
    “He can’t forget that you’re a woman,” Cynda pointed out, “even though you yourself like to. Maybe he thinks he’ll hurt you.”
    “Ha! After what happened on the javelin field this afternoon?” Gyan wriggled into the gown. “Either hurting me is the least of his worries, or he’s not very conscious of danger.” She wasn’t sure which she preferred to believe. Neither seemed very flattering.
    “Probably the latter. Most young men aren’t.” Cynda slapped her palm with the poker before using it to revive the embers. “Maybe by letting you defeat him in sword practice, he thinks he’s being polite.”
    “I wish he wouldn’t try so hard.” Gyan sat on the bed, chin to fist, while Cynda heaved more logs onto the fire.
    “Never mind his fighting skills, then.” She straightened to face Gyan and winked. “What do you think of him as a man?”
    “As a man…”
    Away from the field of competition, especially after their near-accident, he seemed very possessive of her attention, as though he saw her as an object, like a favorite horse or slave or hound, to respond instantly to his call. Surely she had to be mistaken. Didn’t he realize she held the higher rank?
    Gyan gazed into the snapping red-gold flames, willing them to surrender answers to questions she didn’t know how to ask. “Well, he is handsome,” she admitted at last. “And I think he wants me.”
    “That much is obvious.” Cynda suppressed a grin. “Do you want him?”
    The Chieftainess of Clan Argyll knew what her relationship with Urien would mean to her people and his: an end to the hostilities that had raged for years beyond counting, peaceful trade between the settlements, and a free exchange of goods and knowledge and ideas. No more slave raids, no more destruction. No more slaughter.
    Marriage to Urien did seem to be the most logical move for the clan, but Gyan could choose anyone she wished. Was Urien the best choice for her? Did she, as Cynda had asked, want him?
    Slowly tracing the lines of the doves on her sword-bearing forearm, she conjured the day of the tattoo’s birth. She’d received the clan-mark two summers before, to symbolize her status as àrd-banoigin. This role differed from that of the chieftainess, who shared the responsibilities of leadership with the chieftain. Through her heirs, the àrd-banoigin forged the destiny of the clan.
    A woman often served as one and not the other. If not for Hymar’s death, such would have been the case for Gyan today.
    Yet the gods had decreed otherwise. For the first time in her life, she felt