Mireva liberated Ruval from the wardrobe. He stepped out, rubbing his nose. “Do you know how close I was to a sneeze?” he complained in a whisper. “That damned perfume of hers—my nose itches to the eyebrows!”
“You’re the only man around here who doesn’t approve,” she countered. “But I may change it all the same—in case someone else has the same reaction.”
“Do that. Well, I’m ready. Is she?”
“In a little while. You know what to do—and what not to?”
Ruval grinned. “It’s tempting, you know. Are you sure I can’t—”
“Not if you value what you’d like to do it with! She must remain virgin.”
“Oh, all right. If she smells the way her clothes do—let’s get on with it. By the way, how am I going to get out past that guard?”
Mireva merely looked at him.
“Never mind. A stupid question.”
She pulled a leather pouch from her pocket and sifted some of its contents into her hand. Half she gave to him, and the rest she licked from her palm. “I know what it tastes like,” she snapped. “Eat it anyway.” When he had done so, grimacing, she drew in a deep, steadying breath.
“Begin, Ruval. Picture him in your mind, just as you saw him in the flesh—the lines of his face, the shape of his body, the color of his hair. ...”
Sionell woke at Antalya’s first whimpers, alerted by that intuition born in most mothers with the births of their children. Thanks to her husband’s skill and dedication in proving his preference for grown women rather than young girls, she had been deeply asleep. But when her daughter began to cry, Sionell got out of bed and went down the hall to the nursery, where Antalya had succeeded in waking Chayla and Rohannon as well.
The cause of Talya’s distress was the loss onto the floor of the big green stuffed dragon her grandmother Feylin had given her. Sionell put all to rights while the twins’ nursemaid quieted them down—not an easy task, as Hollis had cautioned when accepting Sionell’s suggestion that the pair would enjoy a brief visit to Tiglath while their parents were at Stronghold. “They have a tendency to bounce—not just off the beds but all the way to the ceiling,” Hollis had sighed. “And if there wasn’t a ceiling, they’d fly.”
Bouncing restrained for the night, Sionell shut the nursery door behind her and smiled. Tallain, she was morally certain, hadn’t woken up—probably hadn’t even moved. He’d earned his rest tonight. The smile became a grin as she reflected that she had, too. Retracing the steps to their chambers, she glanced down the long hallway to where the guard stood outside Meiglan’s rooms. Tomorrow she would start a campaign to put a little spine into the girl. And if Miyon regretted losing the cringing object of his mockery, too bad for Miyon.
Sionell was about to discard her bedrobe onto a chair in the anteroom when she heard another cry. Not a child this time—an adult. Struggling back into the robe, she hurried down the hall, following a second high-pitched scream. She thought she glimpsed two shadows descending the stairs, but suddenly there were so many other people around that she forgot about them. Meiglan, her cloud of golden hair in wild tangles, was the center of attention and the source of the screams—which were abruptly silenced as her maidservant shook her. She gasped for breath, trembling from head to foot.
Riyan, whose room was two doors down from Meiglan’s, got to her first. “Easy now, my lady—that’s it, calm yourself. Shh. It’s all right.” He patted her shoulder and smiled reassuringly—and Sionell noted wryly that he couldn’t quite keep his eyes off the slender curves half-visible through a misty silk nightdress. “Nothing to be afraid of, Lady Meiglan, nothing at all.”
The little knot of people untied for Sionell. But before she could take charge, Rialt stepped forward and said, “If I may, my lady?” He dismissed the extraneous servants and guards with a glance, told the maid to fetch mulled wine, and shepherded Meiglan through the antechamber door. Sionell traded glances with Riyan, whose shoulders lifted in bewilderment.
They, and Meiglan’s assigned guard, followed Rialt. “What happened?” Sionell asked.
“She flung open the door, my lady, screaming that there was someone in her room. A man.”
“Impossible,” Sionell stated.
The guard nodded his gratitude for her trust in him. “Exactly, my lady. Even if someone had gotten past me, her other servant, the older one, was inside. She would have called out.”
“Hmm.” Sionell peeked around the inner door, seeing that Rialt had gotten Meiglan propped on pillows with brisk, sympathetic efficiency and was lighting candles. Suddenly a whole branch of them sprang to life and the girl caught her breath in fright. Rialt merely glanced around, brows arching mildly.
“Riyan,” Sionell chided in disgust.
“Saves time,” he told her with a shrug.
And gets you a better look at her in that flimsy little scrap of silk, she thought, amused. “Go back to bed. I’ll see what’s troubling her.”
“I’ll stay if you like—”
“No, you’d like,” she responded, unable to resist teasing him. He grinned, unrepentant. “Oh, get out of here,” she added, giving him a push.
A little while later she had calmed Meiglan down enough to get some speech out of her—not that it made much sense. Sitting beside her, Sionell pressed her chilled fingers and smiled bracingly; the second time tonight she had soothed a scared child.
“It was just a dream, my dear.”
“I’m sorry, my lady—I didn’t mean to cause any trouble! But please don’t tell my father!”
“Don’t worry about anything. It’s quite all right.”
The pallid face with its huge, liquid dark eyes was nearly lost in the unruly mass of curls. “There was a man here, my lady—I swear it.”
“Meiglan—”
“There was! You have to believe me!”
Sionell humored her. “Did you see him clearly enough to identify him?” A small, tense nod. “Then you must tell me, so he can be found and punished. Tell me exactly what happened and what you saw.”
Meiglan nodded again like a good little girl. “I couldn’t sleep—the room is beautiful, my lady, and the bed is very comfortable, it isn’t that—”
“At times we all have trouble sleeping,” Sionell said, hiding her impatience with the frantic apology. “Go on.”
“I—I went to the kitchens, the guard showed me where, and had hot taze and cakes. Thanys found me and brought me back upstairs, and Mireva stayed in the outer room when I went back to bed. I was almost asleep but—but something woke me up and I opened my eyes and he was standing right there—”
Meiglan’s eyes glazed with fear and fixed on a point at the foot of the bed. Sionell squeezed her hand reassuringly. “What did he look like?”
“He—he was tall and slim, with blond hair. I think his eyes were blue.”
Most Desert dwellers were as dark as the Fironese, though without the tip-tilted eyes characteristic of that princedom. Redheads like Sionell and her mother cropped up occasionally, even in bloodlines unmixed with outsiders, but true blonds were extremely rare. There were perhaps five fair-haired men in all Tiglath besides Tallain himself—and Sionell knew that none of them had been in Meiglan’s bedchamber. It had been a dream.
“He was wearing two rings,” Meiglan whispered. “One on each hand. A large ring with two stones, one golden and one dark, I think an amethyst. The other hand—it was on his middle finger and it glowed like clouds around the moons—”
Rialt made a slight sound by the doorway. Sionell kept her voice even and said, “There’s no one like that here at Tiglath, my dear.”
Meiglan shook again as if her fragile bones would shatter. “But I saw him! I swear I did!”
“I’m sure it seemed that way to you. Dreams can be very real at times, when we’re halfway between sleeping and waking. I know you think you saw this man, Meiglan, but he wasn’t here.”