Robert rubbed at his eyes and peered through the bushes. Perhaps it was best that L'Indasha wanted him to bring back the girl. Perhaps it was a rescue of sorts.
The crack of a dried twig sent him burrowing deep in the aeterna. Cautiously, as if he were scouting an enemy camp, he parted the blue branches.
The girl. He had not needed to wait long.
"We can't leave," Aglaca maintained. "Even if we could elude the guards, I will not leave." Judyth regarded him skeptically. "It's odd to keep honor with Daeghrefn and Ver-minaard, since neither knows the word," she declared fiercely, and Aglaca started at the heat of her reply.
The two of them sat quietly in the garden as the evening stars emerged in the autumn sky. His head in Judyth's lap, Aglaca looked up into the turning constellations and watched Solinari rising in the eastern sky.
The silver moon was in High Sanction, in the phase of fullness and power. Whatever magic rode upon the night was good now, was auspicious.
"It's not Daeghrefn and Verminaard. It's … something else," Aglaca said. "Something I learned this afternoon." But he remained silent about what he had learned. "I see," Judyth said after a long silence, resting her hand on Aglaca's shoulder. "But brother or friend or … whatever, I think it would be foolhardy to believe that Verminaard will protect you. He's going to join with the Nerakans, Aglaca. Do you think his other treaties will fare any better? When the bargains are his alone to strike or break?"
"Yes. Hmmm. I don't know."
Judyth leaned back against the wall and closed her eyes. "He's come to find me. He's trying to court me,
Aglaca." . "To court you?" Aglaca shot to his feet.
"For a week now," Judyth explained. "At first it was confusing. He stood at the door to your quarters and boasted of his deeds against the ogres, as if I hadn't the eyes nor the sense to know that for the lie it was. The number of monsters he had killed multiplied with each telling, and each time he stepped farther into the room."
"'Farther into the room'? You let him in?" Aglaca asked icily, jumping up from the bench.
"No farther when I told him to stop," Judyth replied hastily, her eyes averted. "And then it was gifts. Always jewelry: bracelets, a ring, cloisonne-"
"What's a cloisonne?"
Ignoring his question, Judyth reached for something around her neck. "And then it was this."
"Bring it to the light, Judyth. I can't see it."
She stepped away from the shadows and, standing in the cool light of Solinari, displayed the jewel. The moonlight shone on a single triangular lavender-blue stone, fixed in the heart of six silver flower petals.
"What is it?" Aglaca asked. "And why-"
"I had to take it," Judyth explained. "It wasn't his to give."
"How do you know?"
"I don't," she confessed, hiding away the pendant. "At least, I'm not sure how I do. But the moment I saw it… well, something told me I must take it, must return it to its proper owner."
"And now he thinks you've received gifts from him," Aglaca said. "And he'll take that to mean .. . That's why he thinks …" He caught himself, averting his gaze from Judyth's.
"Are you taking your brother's part?" the girl snapped, and the couple fumed in the shadows as an owl soared over the walls with the faintest whisper of wings.
Judyth almost told Aglaca then-almost told him of the orders that had urged her to leave the safety of her home two years ago, the command that had led her wandering over the plains of Solamnia into the dangerous East, through Throt and Estwilde until she reached the foothills of the Khalkists, where the bandits …
She rubbed at the hated tattoo on her leg. They had not been gentle.
She almost told him, but she wasn't sure he would understand. It sounded foolish, she admitted: that his
father, her commander, would send a lone girl traveling through bandit and goblin country, armed with only a dagger and led …
Led by old intelligence. By the ancient rules of Solamnic espionage. But led by more, as well, in ways that Laca hadn't reckoned. By instinct. By intuition and dream.
How else could she explain consenting to a dangerous and reckless undertaking-going forth with few guide-posts beyond her bookish knowledge of the mountains and a strange, secret sense that whatever it was she pursued was still just ahead of her, or passing somewhere nearby, in the cloaked and mysterious night?
It sounded too flighty and foolish for words. But by indirection, she had come to the place she was sent, to the duties with which she had been charged years back by Aglaca's father.
Sound the situation at Nidus, Laca Dragonbane had charged her. And send me word of my son. But something had sent her long before the Solamnic orders, and when he had commanded, she had sensed then and there that her journey east was the beginning of what she had lived to do.
It was all too veiled and mysterious. She was relieved beyond measure when Aglaca finally spoke.
"Judyth, we shouldn't argue," he said, touching her shoulder softly. "We shouldn't begin to argue, with the castle around us filled with conspiracy and scheme."
Slipping her arm about his neck, the girl nodded. "You have your honor, I suppose. And whatever mystery you've discovered. And I… well, I believe that I am bound for something important and good and needful. It's … it's only Castle Nidus that makes those things seem foolish."
"You're right, Judyth," Aglaca conceded. "Which is why I shall have to find a way to get us free of this dilemma. Verminaard is not in control of himself. I'll
wager my life on it. And of late, I have found something that may help in the wager."
"Something?" her forehead rested against the back of his neck. He felt her skin, cool and soft against his skin.
"Another choice," he replied softly. "Another pass through the mountains. For instead of following one of Verminaard's proffered choices and betraying you, my father, and even him in the process, I shall choose a third path."
"A third path?"
"I shall turn him from this romance with Nightbringer, this marriage to darkness. But there are forces against me-forces at work in this castle, Judyth, that seek to bind him to a bitter pact. He has taken instruction from the worst of teachers."