She looked at him, questioning, and saw a great ravening beast in the place of her lover. She turned and ran, but he flew ahead of her and dropped over her, knocking her to the ground. She struggled uselessly and then they were still,
Rialla lay facedown on the cool wooden floor and panted, listening to the silence that was as much a tribute as the applause that followed.
Laeth stumbled up the stairs with exaggerated care and pulled her to her feet. He grinned and waved at the assembly, managing a credible bow that tested Rialla’s ability to maintain her slave face over her laughter, and tugged her off the stage and out of the room by a side exit.
Safe once more in the suite, Laeth pulled off his alcohol-soaked shirt and undershirt while Rialla washed her face in the cool water in the ewer.
“How did you do that bit with the cloak where it flew up and then dropped?” Laeth’s voice was muffled as he pulled a clean tunic over his head. “Is it weighted?”
“It’s weighted, but it still takes a lot of practice to get it to fly just right.” Rialla sifted through her bag and finally came up with a clean tunic. With it in hand she went to the changing room and stripped out of the dancing costume. The cotton tunic felt feather-light in comparison, though it was longer than most of its kind and hung well past her knees.
Barefoot, she returned to the bedroom and dumped the costume on top of her traveling bag. The bells protested her lack of care, but she ignored the noise as she knelt beside the bag and fought to snug the laces. “Shouldn’t you have performed your drunken sot routine a little sooner? There’s only one day left before we return.” The bag taken care of, she sat cross-legged on the heavy carpet that padded the floor.
Laeth flung himself backward on the bed and said, “Seeing that the primary suspect seems to be my uncle, I suppose it was better to do it today then never. Maybe another slave-training worm will come crawling out into the open, and become the next suspect as Karsten’s failed assassin.”
Rialla could only see his legs from where she was sitting, but she didn’t have to see his face to understand how he was feeling. “I’m sorry, Laeth. It might not be him. The slave girl could have belonged to someone else.”
“No,” he replied. “I told Terran that I had seen an unusually colored slave girl arrive, and he said she was Uncle’s. She died last night.”
“She might have been from somewhere that I’ve never been. There are a number of peoples in the far South, by the salt seas or over the sea, that I have never seen. My empathy is not so infallible that I could tell for sure she was from the East.” Rialla was responding to the misery in his voice rather than out of any conviction of her own.
“I don’t doubt that the girl was from the East. It’s all right, Ria, you don’t have to make excuses for him. Even if he isn’t trying to kill Karsten, he is not the man I thought he was. He is not only a slave trainer, but a slave trader.” He gave a half laugh. “You know, it probably wouldn’t have bothered me before I met you.”
Laeth sat up on the bed and crossed his legs underneath him, ignoring the damage his boots were doing to the bed tick. “I always wondered where he got his wealth, but I was never interested enough to find out. Before he inherited the Winterseine estate from a cousin, the only land he owned was a small property in the South, good for fanning but not much else. Everything that Grandfather had went to Father, and then Karsten. If Uncle earns his money through slavery, it gives him a definite motive for killing Karsten.”
Rialla reached up and touched him on the knee, a rare gesture from her. “Lady Marri might not have been far off when she claimed someone was trying to blame you for the assassination attempts. If Winterseine manages to pin the blame on you, then he gains control of all the wealth Karsten holds, as well as a good deal of the power.”
He gave her a tired smile. “I suppose we’ll just have to see to it that my brother doesn’t get killed. Then I won’t have to worry.”
The great ballroom had been cleaned and polished for the occasion. Even its healthy size was barely capable of handling the crowd of people who had come to celebrate the birthday of the most powerful lord in the realm. There was scarcely room to stand, let alone dance.
The gentry, and the more wealthy merchants and farmers of the surrounding areas, had been invited to mingle with the powerful aristocrats. Mostly, thought Rialla as she dodged through the crowd with the cool glass of ale she had brought from the kitchens, so that Karsten could house some visitors with the local gentry rather than trying to cram them even tighter in his keep.
She had gone on many such errands this evening, allowing her to mingle despite her slave status, but she’d managed to overhear nothing more interesting than a clandestine affair. She’d managed to avoid Lord Winterseine, chiefly because he had not sought her out, but she found herself constantly aware of his presence.
Approaching Laeth, Rialla observed that his little group had been invaded by Lord Karsten and Lady Marri. Laeth’s brother looked pale and had spent the better part of the ball sitting down on one of the couches set up here and there along the edge of the room. Marri kept her hand on his arm and her eyes lowered, like any good Darranian wife. Laeth’s cousin Terran stood quietly in the background with several other young men.
“… lucky that the healer is as good as he is.” Rialla caught the tail end of Laeth’s statement as she handed him the vessel she carried.
“Indeed,” agreed Karsten, “I sent an invitation to him this morning requesting his presence here so I could suitably reward him.”
“Did you offer him enough of a bribe that he would show up? If you don’t express your gratitude to him, people might think that you were lacking in manners.”
Laeth’s comment drew a gasp from someone, but his brother only laughed.
“As a matter of fact, I told him I wanted to talk to him about reducing the amount of payment that the village owes me,” said Lord Karsten, exchanging a boyish grin with Laeth. “If that doesn’t make him show up, I don’t know what will.”
“Lady Marri looks thirsty,” observed Laeth laconically. “Would you care for something from the kitchens? Some ale, perhaps?”
“Please,” she agreed. With a gesture, Laeth sent Rialla scurrying back to the kitchen.
She was almost to the door when some instinct caused her to spin around and look up. In a corner of the domed ceiling a shadow coalesced and condensed until it took on a monstrous, writhing, floating form that seemed to swim through the air as if it were buoyant.
Someone else noticed the thing and screamed. The creature, now fully materialized, slowly twisted through the air toward Lord Karsten like a giant snake with tentacles. Then it hesitated, as if something caught its attention. At the same time, Rialla felt a tentative touch on her mind; gentle and seductive, it froze her where she stood.
The thing shifted direction with a swiftness that something that size shouldn’t have, whipping its tail behind it with an audible crack. Green and brown patches of scraggly fibers that looked remarkably like weeds hung here and there from its body, dropping off as if the creature had leprosy. The end of its tail was armed with sharp black spikes that glistened wetly in the light of the ballroom chandeliers. The only bright color on it was the red of its eyes, all six of them glittering like a king’s ransom of rubies as they focused on its prey—Rialla.
Rialla absently took a step closer to it, as it hovered slightly in front and above her. While she was standing there, the better part of the crowd fled the room in a blind panic, until the space around her was unoccupied, leaving only a knot of people near Lord Karsten on the far side of the room. It stretched out one of its black, cordlike tentacles and touched her carefully, ruffling her hair.