“I’ll depart, madam, all in good time. But I seem to remember, madam, I did you a kindness which hasn’t been repaid.”
“Ah, yes. The prince rescued me from a serpent. What do you want, then? The usual mercenary’s fee?”
“What I have in mind I don’t imagine you spend on hired soldiers.”
Val Mala’s eyes widened. She took a step back, and he several steps forward. He reached out his large hands and gripped her velvet arms.
“Before I leave, I’ve promised myself something. And I calculate you know precisely what.”
“Your insolence is disgusting.”
“I always appear to disgust you, but you graciously granted me this audience. And so beautiful and elegantly dressed you are for it. Or do I mistake? Did you pretty yourself for Amnorh instead?”
“Let me go.”
He pulled her against him and thrust one hand inside the neck of her gown, his fingers closing like five claws of hot metal on her right breast. She reached up and raked the point of a ring down his cheek. He came away from her in a second, but caught her wrists in his hand and struck her across the face without hesitation. The blow chopped her to one side, and only the grasp on her wrists kept her from falling. A weal of dark blood appeared like a brand on her cheek.
“Hell take you for that!” she screamed.
He swung her up struggling.
“What dulcet tones my lady has,” he said, and he was very jovial. He carried her across the floor, and she shouted at him and fought against him all the way. He kept her hands tight and a distance from his eyes. Her spite was entirely impotent.
A brief colonnade led to the door of her bedchamber. He thrust the door open and then shut, and dropped her down onto the coverlet, where the embroidery of suns and moons flared up shocked eyes at him.
“Do this to me and I’ll kill you,” she hissed.
“Try by all means. I’ve slain men in single combat sixty times, each one fully armed and skilled in weaponry. Don’t think you could do better.”
He bent over her and began to unlace her bodice but she scratched at him. He immediately struck her hands away and effortlessly ripped the material open and the lacy undergarment with it. The false paleness of her unguent faded into copper on her breasts. He slid both hands to cover the erect red buds at their centers and felt them harden, like warm stones, against his palms.
“Now,” he said, “this isn’t Zastis, madam. You’ve no excuse for that. And I am so disgusting to you. Let me disgust you a little further.”
He pushed aside the heavy folds of her skirt.
When he entered her she made a sound in her throat far from anger, and her arms came clinging to his back, but he pushed her away and held her still, totally passive under his riding. Not a long but a hard ride. At her abandoned cries of ecstasy he slipped the tether and fell plunging in blind convulsions of pleasure through the golden thunder of her body.
“You hurt me,” she murmured. Her soft hand slid over him, finding out his hard muscular body, its plains and crevices, the core of his loins, which stirred faintly, even now, beneath her touch. “You’re well endowed for this work.”
“And you are a whore,” he remarked.
She only laughed, and soon he pushed her back and took her again.
The blue dust of night settled in the room.
Orhn left the bed and stood against the open windows, a towering male symmetry composed of darkness. Lifted on one elbow, Val Mala considered him.
“You abuse me, then leave me, Orhn. To Alisaar?”
He did not reply.
“Do me a service before you go,” she said, and caught the glint of his eyes turning to her. “Help me rid myself of the Lord Warden of Koramvis.” Unable to see his mouth, she surmised he might be smiling. “And also of the she-witch who practices sorcery against me.”
He came back to the bed and sat beside her, and now she saw the smile. Still he said nothing.
“Orhn, might it be possible that the girl’s baby wasn’t Rehdon’s seed . . . perhaps some priest, before he used her—”
He stretched out and cupped her breasts.
“Val Mala, when we found Rehdon dead, the Lowland girl sent herself into a kind of trance, which Amnorh claimed himself able to revive her from. He was alone with her in his tent for some time.”
The breath hissed between her teeth.
“So.”
“So. I’ve answered both your questions, I think. And the child which troubles you so greatly is no more than rotten fruit.”
“Amnorh shall be killed.”
Orhn shrugged. She caught the lobe of his ear between her teeth and bit it viciously. He pushed her away with an amused curse.
“Do as you like, gadfly. You’ve only the gods to answer to.”
“And you. Is it the regency you want, or me?”
“The regency. You, sweetheart, are the worthless dross that comes with it.”
White stars clustered in the sky, swung in the stained glass of the river, on the brink of which black hovels craned up to the moon. Some way off, on the opposite bank, the glow of a temple’s lights spilled down narrow steps into the water.
Lomandra moved along avenues of old cobbles, between the rat-infested remains of walls. Often she glanced nervously from side to side. Earlier a man had come out at her from a rotten doorway, thinking probably that she was a prostitute searching for custom.
“Let me by. I am summoned to the Garrison,” she had managed to choke out, and this invocation of the name of law deterred him.
She came to the place this time on foot, the hem of her cloak wet with mud from the filthy gutters, she, who had always in the past ridden here in curtained litters. It was a large formless building, white walls soiled with dirt and night. The guard at the gate blocked her path with a slanted spear.
“What’s your business?”
Lomandra had no presence of mind left to her at this moment.
“I am here to see the Dragon Lord, Kren.”
“Oh, are you, miss? Well, the dragon is busy, too busy to be interested in your sort.”
She felt her body wilting with weak hopelessness, but another man spoke from the dark beyond the gate.
“You, sentry. Let the lady through.”
The guard swung round, saluted, moved aside. Lomandra came into the dingy, damp court. She could not see the man’s face, but his voice had seemed familiar. He took her arm gently.
“The Lady Lomandra—am I correct?”
He led her beneath the pulsing splutter of a grease torch, and, looking up, she was able to identify him. His name was Liun, a man of Karmiss, one of Kren’s captains.
“Yes, I see you are.” His mouth took on a scornful slant. “You must have missed him unbearably to come here alone. These streets are no place for a court woman, particularly after dark.”
“I—have to see him. . . .” She halted, uncertain as to what he would do, how much credence he would give her. If he judged her a pestering fool, no doubt he would do his best to keep between her and the Dragon Lord. But there was an unexpected warmth in his tone when he spoke again.
“If you’ll forgive me, you seem unwell. Come inside. The place is grim enough, but at least impervious to river damp.”
They passed between a row of sentries at perfect attention and in through the studded cibba-wood doors. Too casually he said to her: “Has he given you a child?”
“No,” she said. Her eyes watered with tiredness. “No. And yet,” she thought, “it’s because of a child that I’ve come.” Ashne’e’s child, taken in the concealing dark from the palace, now hidden away in one of the dank houses by the river and fed on pulps. The old woman who rented out the slum had scarcely glanced at the baby’s tiny damaged paw, but no doubt she was inured to the injured brats and frenzied mothers among the poor. Lomandra struggled against a sudden dreadful urge to weep. She seemed to have lived a year without sleep. Why she had done as the Lowlander told her she hardly knew, and did not permit herself to seek for an answer, afraid of what it might be.