With the lightest of touches, she let her hands come to rest on his shoulders, then allowed them to run lightly over his collar as if she were smoothing it. Her hands closed gently on the heavy muscles of his shoulders, her thumbs dug deliciously into the tight bands that encircled his spine as her fingers gently massaged the soreness from his neck.
Just as Rhapsody had always done.
She had magic in her hands, magic that soothed his tension and brought warmth to the deepest places that were tight and sore. Against his will Ashe closed his eyes, surrendering for a moment to the blissful ministrations of her hands.
Then went cold with the horror of what was happening.
Rage began to burn in his belly, anger at the liberties this servant was taking with him, but a deeper fury was building, directed at himself for allowing her to take those liberties.
And enjoying them.
He tried to keep his smoldering anger from igniting too quickly, reminding himself that it was a common practice in other keeps, other castles, for the servants to believe that servicing the master’s needs, physical and sexual, was part of their indenture. When he was an adolescent his own father, a holy man widowed by Ashe’s birth, had had a coterie of whores, each of whom had the countersign to open the secret door into Llauron’s office. So he kept himself as steady as he could, despite his inner desire to fling the girl across the room.
He set his teeth and spoke in as calm a voice as he could.
“Portia,” he said quietly, “you have truly beautiful hands. Soft as milk, and gentle. It would be a shame if I have to cut them off, which I will, if you don’t remove them from me immediately.”
A gasp of shock went up from the doorway. Ashe spun in his chair.
The serving girl was standing in the doorframe, the lid of the serving tray still in her hands. She began to tremble in confusion, tears forming in her large brown eyes.
Ashe looked wildly around him; his meal was still on the table before him, untouched. The nap of the silk carpet showed two sets of her footprints, and his dragon sense could immediately tell from the lack of heat in them that she had made her way directly to the door, rather than lingering.
His stomach clenched.
“Forgive me,” he stammered. “I—I thought—”
The young woman burst into tears.
Ashe pushed the tray aside and rose; Portia froze, her body going rigid with shock.
“I am sorry, again, I apologize,” the Lord Cymrian said awkwardly. “You may go.”
Portia dropped a quick curtsy and skittered through the door, closing it behind her. She waited until she had gotten all the way back to her bedroom, had thrown herself on her bed and pulled the cover over her head, before allowing herself the pleasure of a grin.
By that time, the Lord Cymrian was no longer thinking about her, and was actively ignoring anything his dragon sense might tell him about her. He had bounded up the stairs, two at a time, to gather the provisions he would need for his trip to the silent lake in the forest of Gwynwood.
He did not even wait until morning to leave.
32
The silence of the forest was broken occasionally by the twitter of winterbirds.
Achmed stopped long enough in his trek to point a deadfall out to Krinsel, the Bolg midwife, before stepping over a rotten tree. He waited until the woman had nodded her understanding and had circumvented the natural trap before turning and continuing deeper into the forest.
They had been traveling along a tributary of the Tar’afel River for some time, knowing that the brook would eventually empty into a quiet lake near the dragon’s lair. Achmed was listening intently, paying little attention to the glistening white trees, their branches dripping soft drops of snow in the heat of the morning sun.
He was following a sound that resonated in his ears as well as his blood; the namesong by which Rhapsody had called him. The song vibrated in his soul and resonated in his eardrums, through the sensitive network of veins and nerves that formed his skin-web, to the very tips of his fingers.
Achmed the Snake, come to me.
It was both a welcome sensation, and horrific one, to be summoned thus by a Namer. While the melody being chanted in the distance was perfectly attuned to his brain and the natural vibrations that he emitted in the course of drawing breath, there was still something deeply disturbing to him about his name being on the wind, even if no other living soul could hear it. Achmed had been a solitary and secretive creature his entire life.
Some habits were hard to break, some natural impulses all but impossible to overcome.
Achmed, come to me.
The winter had faded, as it always did in the middle continent during Thaw, for one turn of the moon. The ground at the base of trees was visible, dead or emergent grass in tones of pale green and gold drying in the morning wind. The snowcap, hard and frozen most of the winter, had softened to a thin, watery layer, and the breeze was warm, but did not carry the scent of spring, because the melt was false. In a few short weeks the cold would return with a vengeance, choking back any early shoots that might have come up in response to the cruel invitation the earth issued during Thaw, burying them securely under a resilient blanket of hard white ice until the turning of the season.
Still, he had to admit to himself that it was pleasant to hear Rhapsody’s voice in his ears again. She had been away from Ylorc for so many years now that he had almost grown accustomed to not hearing the morning messages she used to broadcast daily through the natural echo chamber of the ring of rocks that rose above her subterranean home in the grotto of Elysian, an underground lake in his lands.
Even though she liked living alone when she, Grunthor, and he had first come to Ylorc, away from the Firbolg who considered her a source of food and watched her hungrily when she passed by, Rhapsody was good at keeping in touch, and made of point of checking in with him each day. When she first married Ashe and moved to Navarne Achmed found to his shock that he missed her Lirin sunrise aubades and sunset devotions as well, the love songs of her people, sung to the heavens and the stars they had been born beneath, ceremonies she had marked daily all the time that he had known her. She had even continued to sing the prayers when they were traveling within the earth along the Axis Mundi, as far from the stars as it was possible to be, and so they were annoyingly ingrained in his mind, enough so that not hearing them had become even more bothersome than hearing them had been.
So it was, in a way, comforting to hear her voice again, singing his name, in the depths of his consciousness. Almost as comforting as it was disturbing.
He inhaled, allowing the air of the forest to circulate through his sensitive sinuses. Then he grimaced.
There was a taste of salt on the wind; Achmed rolled it around in his mouth, then spat it out on the ground sourly. They were a good way from the sea, and the breeze was blowing from the east, not the west, so that tang could only mean one thing.
Ashe was around here somewhere.
From what he could ascertain the droplets of salty water were a ways off; perhaps he had as much as half a day’s lead on Rhapsody’s husband. Achmed signaled to Krinsel to hurry; he wanted to have a chance to confer with the Lady Cymrian alone before Ashe showed up and distracted her completely, as he had done ever since he interposed himself in their lives four years before.
Achmed.
Achmed flinched and shook his head; the voice was different now, harsher, he thought, though when pondering a moment later he realized that it was not a good characterization of it. Is she growing impatient? he wondered as he quickened his steps, homing in on the aural beacon. Tired of being holed up in a dragon’s cave for an unknown number of months or even years, until her confinement is over and her brat born?