"Because I've seen you when you've had too much to drink. You get sad. Sappy."
"Sappy!"
"And the next day you've forgotten it entirely, which is no more flattering than you wishing you hadn't said it."
"I never wish I hadn't said what I've said to you." I reconsidered. "Well, maybe sometimes. When we have disagreements, though those are extremely rare." I was rewarded by the crimped mouth I expected to see. "But hoolies, bascha, I just came back from the dead! Doesn't that allow me some latitude to say what I want?"
"But then the Sandtiger will have divulged a portion of himself he wants no one ever to see."
"His sappiness?"
Del laughed. "You have survived by letting them think you are not soft."
I grunted. "Softness doesn't survive in the circle."
"So I have said." A strand of silken hair trapped itself against stubble and claw scars. "But I know what you are. You needn't say it where anyone else might hear."
"At the moment what I'm feeling has nothing to do with, er, softness."
Del patted my lap. "I know."
I couldn't help the startled reflexive twitch of every muscle in my body. I caught her hand, gripped it, fixed her with a forbidding scowl. "Gently, bascha!"
"No," she said. "Fiercely. So I know, and you know, you're very much alive."
Oh. Well, yes. I could manage that. Being brought back from the dead does give a man the motivation to make certain all the parts still work.
Some hours later, the silent, kilted servant led me out of the house to a small, private terrace tucked into one of the niches between domed room and arched. Akritara appeared to be full of such places, cobbled together over the years from a set of chambers into a sprawling assemblage of them. And here I found an array of potted plants, all blooming so that the air was rich with fragrance. I was startled to see that a rising breeze blew the hedges along the low wall into tattered fragments; this must be the wind Nihko had mentioned, forcing the people of Skandi to train their grapevines into baskets.
I squinted against the dust, then turned back toward the house as the servants touched my arm. And there was the Stessa metri, seated in a chair. The linen of her belted tunic rippled slightly, but her chair had been set back into a niche that the wind only barely reached.
Her eyes appraised me coolly. "Do you feel better?"
I ran a hand down the front of my tunic. "A bath, fresh clothing, a meal-what more could a man ask?"
"I referred to none of those things."
I blinked, then felt my face warm. Which in itself annoyed me; I haven't blushed in, well, so many years I couldn't count them.
"Well?"
"Well what?"
"Do you feel better?"
"I'm just glad I'm alive to feel anything."
Her gaze yet probed me. "Did you not release your seed in her?"
I looked around for a chair. Didn't find one. Looked around for the servant in hopes he might bring one, but he was gone. So I sat down on the nearest portion of knee-high wall, in the wind, and smiled sweetly at her. "Aren't you a little blunt for a woman of your, um, maturity? Or are you just trying to shock me?"
One brow rose slightly. "Do you shock?"
"Not often."
"I thought not." She smoothed a fold in the sheer linen of her tunic skirts with a deft hand. "Did you?"
"Did I what?"
"Release your seed in her."
I considered her. "Do you want me to believe you're a woman who takes pleasure in hearing bedroom tales of others?"
"Tell me," she said only.
I stood up then, left the wall, took three strides to her. Leaned down, looming, so that my face was but a thumb's length from hers. "Yes," I said. "Anything else you want to know? How many times, who was on top, how long I lasted?"
She did not recoil from my closeness, or my tone. "My heir," she said quietly, "must be capable of bedding a woman. Of what use is an heir if he can sire no children?"
I straightened, startled. "This is about children?"
Her gray-green eyes were smoky. "Do you wish to believe I'm a woman who finds pleasure in hearing bedroom tales of others?"
I opened my mouth, shut it. Could find no response.
"Give me your hands."
"My hands?"
"I want to examine them."
"Didn't you get a good enough look at me before?"
Her eyes locked with my own. "Who was your mother, that she taught you no manners?"
Unaccountably, it stung. "Your daughter?" I challenged.
From that, she flinched. Color moved in her face, fading. Abruptly I regretted what I had said-exactly as Del had suggested a matter of hours before. It was true this woman had taken me completely off-guard with her questions, but that didn't mean she deserved rudeness in return.
Unless she expected it. Wanted it. To make it easier for her to dismiss me as yet another pretender.
I walked away from the woman then, returning to my perch upon the low wall. I spread my legs, felt the underside of my thighs clench to grip. Tapped sandaled toes faintly against the stone beneath my feet even as the breeze whipped my hair flat against one side of my head. "What happened?"
She told me. Calmly, quietly, with no obvious pain or sorrow, but it was there in her eyes. When she was done, I watched her watching me, weighing her story even as she had weighed mine three days before.
I rose, went to her. This time I didn't loom. I knelt down and offered my hands.
She took them, held them. Turned them. Felt the sword-born calluses, the scars, two knuckles that were enlarged, a little finger left slightly crooked in the healing after a break. I could not read what was in her face, but I thought I knew. This flesh could be hers, and the blood that ran beneath it. As much as perhaps it wasn't.
She released me. "I must know. "
Still kneeling, I shook my head. "There are no easy answers."
"Even difficult answers are answers."
"Maybe," I said. "Maybe not."
Her eyes were shocked. "You would rather not know what became of her?"
"Either way offers no comfort. If she died, knowing won't bring her back. If she gave me away voluntarily-"
"My daughter would never have done so!"
"Then maybe she wasn't your daughter. Maybe I'm not your grandson. Maybe I'm just a Southron/Skandic half-breed, or a full-blooded Skandic lost to the desert of a foreign land." I shrugged. "Or maybe I'm just the unwanted result of some man releasing his seed, and so the girl-released me." Into the Punja, where a newborn infant would die in a matter of hours, offering no proof of one night's pleasure. Or rouse the memory of rape.
"That, too, is possible."
"In which case I'll thank you for your hospitality, collect Del, and go."
"Wait." She gestured briefly as I rose, then dropped the hand to her lap. "Does it mean nothing to you that I might be your grandmother? A wealthy, powerful, dying old woman who was bred of the oldest and most respected family of the island?"
I had at some point shattered her demeanor. She was still proud, still strong, but a sere bitterness chilled her tone. I thought then of all the men who had come before her, claiming to be the grandson of a wealthy, powerful old woman bred of the oldest and most respected family of the island.
She had undoubtedly heard countless lies. I gave her none. Only honesty. "It would mean more," I told her, "just to have a grandmother. No matter who or what she is."
I left her then, as she wept.
TWELVE
GUESTS, we had been given the run of the place. Servants tended the household assiduously, all kilted, all quiet, all perfectly courteous. I didn't know where Nihko and his captain were, but I did know where to find Del. She intended, she'd said when I left her to see the metri, to drown herself.