“Having decided you knew better about the needs of my people and my own choice in the matter than I did?” John’s face never showed much expression, but his voice had a sting to it now, like a scorpion’s tail.
Gareth shied from it, as from a lash. “I—I thought of that, these last days,” he said softly. He looked up again, his face white with an agony of shame. “But I couldn’t let you turn back. And you will be rewarded, I swear I’ll see that you get the reward somehow.”
“And just how’ll you manage that?” John’s tone was sharp with disgust. The deck jarred beneath their feet as the raft ground against the shoals. Lights like marsh candles bobbed down toward them through the gloom. “With a mage at the Court, it couldn’t have taken them long to figure out who’d pinched the King’s seal, nor when he’d be back in Belmarie. I expect the welcoming committee ...” he gestured toward the dark forms crowding forward from the mists. “... is here to arrest you for treason.”
“No,” Gareth said in a defeated voice. “They’ll be my friends from Court.”
As if stepping through a door the forms came into visibility; lanternlight danced over the hard gleam of satin, caressed velvet’s softer nap, and touched edges of stiffened lace and the cloudy gauze of women’s veils, salted all over with the leaping fire of jewels. In the forefront of them all was a slender, dark-haired girl in amber silk, whose eyes, golden as honey with a touch of gray, sought Gareth’s and caused the boy to turn aside with a blush. One man was holding a cloak for her of ermine-tagged velvet; another her golden pomander ball. She laughed, a sound at once silvery and husky, like an echo from a troubled dream.
It could be no one but Zyerne.
John looked inquiringly back at Gareth.
“That seal you showed me was real,” he said. “I’ve seen it on the old documents, down to the little nicks on its edges. They’re taking its theft a bit casually, aren’t they?”
He laid hold of Cow’s bridle and led him down the short gangplank, forcing the others to follow. As they stepped ashore, every courtier on the bank, led by Zyerne, swept in unison into an elaborate Phoenix Rising salaam, touching their knees in respect to the clammy, fish-smelling mud.
Crimson-faced, Gareth admitted, “Not really. Technically it wasn’t theft. The King is my father. I’m the missing Heir.”
V
“So that’s your Dragonsbane, is it?”
At the sound of Zyerne’s voice. Jenny paused in the stony blue dimness of the hall of the enchantress’s hunting lodge. From the gloom in which she stood, the little antechamber beyond the hall glowed like a lighted stage; the rose-colored gauze of Zyerne’s gown, the whites and violets of Gareth’s doublet, sleeves, and hose, and the pinks and blacks of the rugs beneath their feet all seemed to bum like the hues of stained glass in the ember-colored lamplight. The instincts of the Winterlands kept Jenny to the shadows. Neither saw her.
Zyerne held her tiny goblet of crystal and glass up to one of the lamps on the mantel, admiring the blood red lights of the liqueur within. She smiled mischievously. “I must say, I prefer the ballad version myself.”
Seated in one of the gilt-footed ivory chairs on the opposite side of the low wine table, Gareth only looked unhappy and confused. The dimple on the side of Zyerne’s curving, shell pink lips deepened, and she brushed a corner of her lace veils aside from her cheek. Combs of crystal and sardonyx flashed in her dark hair as she tipped her head.
When Gareth didn’t speak, her smile widened a little, and she moved with sinuous grace to stand near enough to him to envelop him in the faint aura of her perfume. Like shooting stars, the lamplight jumped from the crystal facets of Gareth’s goblet with the involuntary tremor of his hand.
“Aren’t you even going to thank me for coming to meet you and offering you the hospitality of my lodge?” Zyerne asked, her voice teasing.
Because she was jealous of Zyerne’s greater powers, Jenny had forced herself to feel, upon meeting her at the ferry, nothing but surprise at the enchantress’s youth. She looked no more than twenty, though at the lowest computation—which Jenny could not keep herself from making, though the cattiness of her reaction distressed her—her age could not have been much less than twenty-six. Where there was jealousy, there could be no learning, she had told herself; and in any case she owed this girl justice.
But now anger stirred in her. Zyerne’s closeness and the hand that she laid with such artless intimacy on Gareth’s shoulder, so that less than a half-inch of her fingertip touched the flesh of his neck above his collar-lace could be nothing but calculated temptations. From what he had told her—from every tense line of his face and body now—Jenny knew he was struggling with all that was in him against his desire for his father’s mistress. Judging by her expression in the lamplight, Gareth’s efforts to resist amused Zyerne very much.
“Lady—Lady Jenny?”
Jenny’s head turned quickly at the hesitant voice. The stairway of the lodge was enclosed in an elaborate latticework of pierced stone; in the fretted shadows, she could make out the shape of a girl of sixteen or so. Only a little taller than Jenny herself, she was like an exquisitely dressed doll, her hair done up in an exaggeration of Zyerne’s elaborate coiffure and dyed like white-and-purple taffy.
The girl curtseyed. “My name is Trey, Trey Clerlock.” She glanced nervously at the two forms framed in the lighted antechamber, then back up the stair, as if fearing that one of Zyerne’s other guests would come down and overhear. “Please don’t take this wrongly, but I came to offer to lend you a dress for dinner, if you’d like one.”
Jenny glanced down at her own gown, russet wool with a hand like silk, banded with embroideries of red and blue. In deference to custom which dictated that no woman in polite society was ever seen with her hair uncovered, she had even donned the white silk veil John had brought back to her from the east. In the Winterlands she would have been accounted royally clad.
“Does it matter so much?”
The girl Trey looked as embarrassed as years of deportment lessons would let her. “It shouldn’t,” she said frankly. “It doesn’t, really, to me, but... but some people at Court can be very cruel, especially about things like being properly dressed. I’m sorry,” she added quickly, blushing as she stepped out of the checkered darkness of the stair. Jenny could see now that she carried a bundle of black and silver satin and a long, trailing mass of transparent gauze veils, whose random sequins caught stray spangles of light.
Jenny hesitated. Ordinarily the conventions of polite society never had bothered her, and her work left her little time for them in any case. Knowing she would be coming to the King’s court, she had brought the best gown she had—her only formal gown, as a matter of fact—aware that it would be out of date. It had been no concern to her what others thought of her for wearing it.
But from the moment she had stepped from the ferry earlier that evening, she had had the feeling of walking among unmarked pitfalls. Zyerne and her little band of courtiers had been all polite graciousness, but she had sensed the covert mockery in their language of eyebrows and glances. It had angered her and puzzled her, too, reminding her too much of the way the other children in the village had treated her as a child. But the child in her was alive enough to feel a morbid dread of their sport.
Zyerne’s sweet laughter drifted out into the hall. “I vow the fellow was looking about him for a bootscraper as he crossed the threshold... I didn’t know whether to offer him a room with a bed or a pile of nice, comfortable rushes on the floor—you know a good hostess must make her guests feel at home...”
For a moment Jenny’s natural suspicion made her wonder if the offer of a gown itself might be part of some scheme to make her look ridiculous. But Trey’s worried blue eyes held nothing but concern for her—and a little for herself, lest she be spotted in the act of spoiling sport. Jenny considered for a moment defying them, then discarded the idea—whatever gratification it might bring was scarcely worth the fight. She had been raised in the Winterlands, and every instinct she possessed whispered for the concealment of protective coloration.