“Oh, you don’t,” she said haughtily. “Your request must go through the proper channels and will take several days. After that you will probably be granted a moment with some underling, if you’re excessively favored. And I doubt, soldier, if you will be.”
Raldnor felt his head spin from fatigue. He considered thrusting by this doll creature into the courts of the palace, but where could he go? Besides, he could see that expression behind her eyes that he had grown used to seeing in Vis women when they looked at him. He chanced his luck with her, having no other choice.
“I’ve killed a man. If Kathaos’s guards find me, I’ll be finished.”
“If you’re a criminal, no doubt you deserve to be punished,” she said, but she was neither afraid nor anxious to see him taken away to a gallows.
“Self-defense,” he said.
“Oh, so they all say. What do you expect I should do with you?”
“Hide me.”
“Oh, indeed? And why should I? I am the chief lady of the Princess Astaris Am Karmiss, and what are you, I wonder? Some riffraff off the streets of Xarabiss under the Lord Councilor’s badge.”
Behind him, from the tiers of the guest mansion, came a sudden sound of shouting and red torchlight moving on the colonnades.
“Decide now, princess’s lady,” he said. “Your mercy or their justice. If they take me, I’ll be fit only for worms by morning.”
Her eyes flickered and her cheeks paled with excitement. She had made her decision.
“Follow me,” she said.
And turning, she and her lamplight drifted between the pillars and into the dark garden walks of Thann Rashek’s palace.
Overhead the moon was a smudge of ivory, and near at hand fountains arced among the vegetable statuary. The scene, so incongruous to him now, affected his draining insanity and anger so that he had a crazy urge to laugh. He slipped an arm about the woman’s small waist, and she pushed it away, though slowly.
“Don’t be insolent with me, soldier.”
“Your beauty precludes all restraint,” he said.
She heard the laughter in his voice and glanced at him curiously.
“Banter, and you in fear of death? Stop here now. This is the place.”
“The place for what? Am I to be so honored—”
This time she did not thrust him off, but said tightly: “You see that avenue? He’ll pass along it when he comes from Astaris’s rooms and then go by you here.”
“Who?”
“The one you say you seek; Amrek the Storm Lord. It’s a route known only to a few. I risk my life telling you.”
“I’m humbled by your supreme bravery,” he said and kissed her. When he let her go, she trembled but said in a measured, cool little voice: “Time enough for that if you survive the night. And remember, you never met me.”
And, taking the lamp, she slipped away, leaving him alone in the black velvet garden, the scent of her costly perfume lingering on his hands.
Amrek sat staring at the woman who was to become his wife. “I am mesmerized,” he suddenly thought, “gawping at her like a fish on a cold slab.” But oddly, neither this realization nor the analogy he had produced made him uneasy. “Well, she was meant to be looked at, devoured with the eyes. The eternal feast.” He could imagine her losing none of this, even with age. She would die at thirty, or else she was immortal, some sort of goddess mistakenly at large. These fancies spread across his mind in many colored fans, evoking no particular emotion. It was on the whole very strange; he had been the subject of violent tearing rages since childhood—the present of his mother, he bitterly supposed. They came on him in white hot waves, like a recurrent illness. More than once he had cowered, suspecting himself mad, before the great and overweening pride of his position swept fear into the underlayers of his consciousness. And yet, with this woman, a stillness had come into his life. Simply to be able to sit like this, quite motionless, as she had been in her carved chair for so long, was a kind of surprising peace. What kept him so still? This banquet of loveliness? Or did she extend some part of her own immobility to the things about her? Certainly it was no gift she brought him on purpose. She was curiously impersonal in all she did, almost unaware of her surroundings. The sudden twinge of nervous jealousy tore him; she might be so easily unaware of him along with all the rest.
“Astaris,” he said. Her amber eyes lifted their inner lids like a cat’s—yet not entirely. She looked at him, but did she see him? “What are you thinking?”
“Thoughts are very abstract, my lord. How should I express them to you?”
“You’re devious, Astaris. When I ask a woman what she’s thought or done and she answers in this way, I invariably conclude that she’s hiding something.”
“We are all born with armor,” she said.
“Riddles.”
She turned her head again and presented to him the profile of an image. He seemed always to see her in these terms—something unreal, an artifice.
“Well, I won’t tax you with it. I’ll tell you instead what I thought as I looked at you. You see, I’m altogether more explicit. Every day, I thought, free men and women make slaves of themselves to please me. And you, merely by your presence which denies me its thoughts, please me more than anything in the world.”
She looked at him again, and said: “When you speak like this, I wonder what you want from me.”
Her words unnerved him. He had never grown accustomed to her directness and her forms of logic.
“I want a queen, Astaris, a woman to give me sons.”
“Perhaps I’ll fulfill neither of these requirements.”
Her calmness stung him. He rose and stood over her, then reached and half lifted her to her feet and moved her body against his.
“Then it must be you I want, must it not? This Karmian flesh.”
Yet he had never lain with her, despite the bed rights given him by their betrothal. He had never analyzed his reserve—it was not, certainly, any kind of fear, yet somehow her serene unreality had held him off. Now, quickened by her nearness and the faint pure scent of her unperfumed skin, he nevertheless felt not the slightest desire to satisfy himself with her. Perhaps she would be disappointing, yet somehow he did not think so. Perhaps rather she was like that treasured gift, guessed at but avoided until the last moment.
Now he kissed her, and his need increasing, only drew back from her and looked in her face. She smiled, a peculiarly sweet smile.
“You inspire tenderness in me,” she said, as if it surprised her as much as it surprised him to be so told. Surprised, and oddly hurt him, too. Desire was transmuted into a sort of disorganized spite. Wildly and blindly, with a sensation of helplessness, he cast himself into the pit.
He let her go and held up before her the gloved left hand.
“And this? Does this inspire tenderness?”
“The hand of legend,” she said.
“Yes. Didn’t you believe me when I told you I wore the glove to mask a knife wound?”
“No,” she said simply.
He turned his back, his face working in sudden pain. He had been moving toward this moment all along, this moment of shame and terror, for he had known she would see his lies in his face when he told them, this damnable seeress.
“Scars, too,” he muttered, “scars, too. I was eight years old when I prayed to the gods to relieve the curse, and I hacked my own flesh to ribbons in the early morning of a feast day in Koramvis. Then Orhn came. I remember Orhn very well. He picked me up and slung me down in her rooms on a couch. ‘Your mewling cub bleeds,’ he said to her. She hated me for that. I was screaming, but I remember how she sent for a girl to clean the blood off the velvet before she called for the physician.”