A qualm crossed her stomach at the thought of sitting through this alone.
Beside her, the light voice danced on. “Oh, yes, you’re a mage, too, aren’t you?... You know I did have some very good training, but it’s the sort of thing that has always come to me by instinct. You must tell me about using your powers to make a living. I’ve never had to do that, you know...” Like the prick of knives in her back, she felt the covert smiles of those who walked in procession behind.
Yet because they were deliberate. Jenny found that the younger woman’s slights had lost all power to wound her. They stirred in her less anger than Zyerne’s temptation of Gareth had. Arrogance she had expected, for it was the besetting sin of the mageborn and Jenny knew herself to be as much prey to it as the others and she sensed the enormous power within Zyerne. But this condescension was a girl’s ploy, the trick of one who was herself insecure.
What, she wondered, did Zyerne have to feel insecure about?
As they took their places at the table. Jenny’s eyes traveled slowly along its length, seeing it laid like a winter forest with snowy linen and the crystal icicles of candelabra pendant with jewels. Each silver plate was inlaid with traceries of gold and flanked with a dozen little forks and spoons, the complicated armory of etiquette; all these young courtiers in their scented velvet and stiffened lace were clearly her slaves, each more interested in carrying on a dialogue, however brief, with her, than with any of their neighbors. Everything about that delicate hunting lodge was designed to speak her name, from the entwined Zs and Us carved in the comers of the ceiling to the delicate bronze of the horned goddess of love Hartemgarbes, wrought in Zyerne’s image, in its niche near the door. Even the delicate music of hautbois and hurdy-gurdy in the gallery was a proclamation, a boast that Zyerne had and would tolerate nothing but the very finest.
Why then the nagging fear that lay behind pettiness?
She turned to look at Zyerne with clinical curiosity, wondering about the pattern of that girl’s life. Zyerne’s eyes met hers and caught their expression of calm and slightly pitying question. For an instant, the golden orbs narrowed, scorn and spite and anger stirring in their depths. Then the sweet smile returned, and Zyerne asked, “My dear, you haven’t touched a bite. Do you use forks in the north?”
There was a sudden commotion in the arched doorway of the hall. One of the minstrels in the gallery, shocked, hit a glaringly wrong squawk out of his recorder; the others stumbled to silence.
“Gaw,” Aversin’s voice said, and every head along the shimmering board turned, as if at the clatter of a dropped plate. “Late again.”
He stepped into the waxlight brightness of the hall with a faint jingle of scraps of chain mail and stood looking about him, his spectacles glinting like steel-rimmed moons. He had changed back into the battered black leather he’d worn on the journey, the wolflude-lined jerkin with its stray bits of mail and metal plates and spikes and the dark leather breeches and scarred boots. His plaids were slung back over his shoulder like a cloak, cleaned of mud but frayed and scruffy, and there was a world of bright mischief in his eyes.
Gareth, at the other end of the table, went red with mortification to the roots of his thinning hair. Jenny only sighed, momentarily closed her eyes, and thought resignedly, John.
He strode cheerily into the room, bowing with impartial goodwill to the courtiers along the board, not one of whom seemed capable of making a sound. They had, for the most part, been looking forward to baiting a country cousin as he tried unsuccessfully to ape his betters; they had scarcely been prepared for an out-and-out barbarian who obviously wasn’t even going to bother to try.
With a friendly nod to his hostess, he settled into his place on the opposite side of Zyerne from Jenny. For a moment, he studied the enormous battery of cutlery arrayed on both sides of his plate and then, with perfect neatness and cleanliness, proceeded to eat with his fingers.
Zyerne recovered her composure first. With a silky smile, she picked up a fish fork and offered it to him. “Just as a suggestion, my lord. We do do things differently here.”
Somewhere down the board, one of the ladies tittered. Aversin regarded Zyerne with undisguised suspicion. She speared a scallop with the fish fork and held it out to him, by way of demonstration, and he broke into his sunniest smile. “Ah, so that’s what they’re for,” he said, relieved. Removing the scallop from the tines with his fingers, he took a neat bite out of it. In a north-country brogue six times worse than anything Jenny had ever heard him use at home, he added, “And here I was thinking I’d been in your lands less than a night, and already challenged to a duel with an unfamiliar weapon, and by the local magewife at that. You had me gie worrit.”
On his other side. Bond Clerlock nearly choked on his soup, and John thumped him helpfully on the back.
“You know,” he went on, gesturing with the fork in one hand and selecting another scallop with the other, “we did uncover a great box of these things—all different sizes they were, like these here—in the vaults of the Hold the year we looked out the bath for my cousin Kat’s wedding. We hadn’t a clue what they were for, not even Father Hiero—Father Hiero’s our priest—but the next time the bandits came down raiding from the hills, we loaded the lot into the ballistas instead of stone shot and let fly. Killed one of ’em dead on the spot and two others went riding off over the moor with all these little spikey things sticking into their backs...”
“I take it,” Zyerne said smoothly, as stifled giggles skittered around the table, “that your cousin’s wedding was an event of some moment, if it occasioned a bath?”
“Oh, aye.” For someone whose usual expression was one of closed watchfulness, Aversin had a dazzling smile. “She was marrying this southern fellow...”
It was probably. Jenny thought, the first time that anyone had succeeded in taking an audience away from Zyerne, and, by the glint in the sorceress’s eyes, she did not like it. But the courtiers, laughing, were drawn into the circle of Aversin’s warm and dotty charm; his exaggerated barbarity disarmed their mockery as his increasingly outrageous tale of his cousin’s fictitious nuptials reduced them to undignified whoops. Jenny had enough of a spiteful streak in her to derive a certain amount of enjoyment from Zyerne’s discomfiture—it was Zyerne, after all, who had mocked Gareth for not being able to take jests—but confined her attention to her plate. If John was going to the trouble of drawing their fire so that she could finish her meal in peace, the least she could do was not let his efforts go to waste.
On her other side. Trey said softly, “He doesn’t look terribly ferocious. From Gareth’s ballads, I’d pictured him differently—stem and handsome, like the statues of the god Sannendes. But then,” she added, winkling the meat from an escargot with the special tongs to show Jenny how it was done, “I suppose it would have been a terrific bore for you to ride all the way back from the Winterlands with someone who just spent his time ‘scanning th’encircling welkin with his eagle-lidded eyes,’ as the song says.”
In spite of Zyerne’s disapproving glances, her handsome cicisbeo Bond was wiping tears of laughter from his eyes, albeit with great care for his makeup. Even the servants were having a hard time keeping their faces properly expressionless as they carried in peacocks roasted and resplendent in all their feathers and steaming removes of venison in cream.
“... so the bridegroom looked about for one of those wood things such as you have here in my rooms,” John was continuing, “but as he couldn’t find one, he hung his clothes over the armor-stand, and damned if Cousin Kat didn’t wake in the night and set about it with her sword, taking it for a bandit...”