Amrek turned and looked at the woman who was to be his wife.
“She seduced my father in Kuma: it’s common knowledge. She was thirteen but advanced for her years.”
“Val Mala,” Astaris said softly, but now she was only a golden shape imprinted on the lamp glow.
Shaking with his anger and his pain, he turned again, this time toward the doorway.
“I’ll leave you, Astaris,” he said stiffly. “You’ll forget what I’ve said to you. It’s dangerous to slander the King.”
For her, such an empty injunction.
Yet he caught a glimpse of her eyes before he left her—those bottomless eyes—and saw the briefest flickering in them, as if he had stirred their depths with his anguish.
So he went out into the night garden, with his own insanity dogging him—a monster, a shadow shape from his own childhood nightmares, for he had terrorized himself in his dreams.
And she remained behind, the faintest despair on her, for she had seen the tortured animal in his eyes, burning there, and had been unable to communicate with it.
The garden was black as death, the moon put out in cloud. Two Dragon Guard fell into step behind, but he scarcely noted them, and they kept their usual respectful distance from him.
At the end of the avenue a figure moved out onto the path in front of him. He was barely aware of it at first, but one Guard ran by him, sword drawn.
“Keep still, whoever you are.”
A light was struck, and Amrek saw then the yellow blazon of Kathaos’s house guard, and after this, the face of a Dortharian prince. The incongruous apparition acted on him like an icy blow. His first thought was: “One of my father’s bastards.”
Then the man spoke.
“I ask clemency of the Storm Lord.”
“Then ask it on your knees,” the Guard rapped out.
The man did not move. He looked in Amrek’s face and said: “King Amrek knows I honor him. He needs no proof.”
Amrek felt himself reacting, not with anger, but with a peculiar excitement to this unforeseen thing. It cleared his head of shadows, and made him back into a human man, and a King.
“So you honor me. And you ask for clemency. Why? What have you done that you need protection?”
“I’ve offended your Lord Councilor.”
“How?”
The man on the path grinned a savage and exultant grin. He might have been drunk, but not on any kind of wine.
“Ryhgon of Zakoris goes one-handed from this night on.”
The nearer escort sucked breath sharply between his teeth; the second muttered an exclamation. Ryhgon had a certain reputation among the Dragon Guard.
“What made you come to me?” Amrek demanded sharply.
“Frankly because your lordship has more authority than Kathaos Am Alisaar.”
The moon slid out overhead and sketched dim gray ghosts between the trees. The man on the path blinked and shook his head as if the light troubled him, and Amrek noted lines of intense weariness on the extraordinary face. At this Amrek experienced an unexpected awareness of this man. As when he had seen Astaris for the first time, he felt himself confronted by a personality, a live thing—instead of the silken cutouts of people who generally moved around him, bowing and flinching, or else steeped in their own concealments and ironies as was Kathaos. And he sensed, too, a strange rearrangement of planes either inside himself or without. He felt that he was facing a part of his destiny. The insight was astounding. He looked hard at the stranger, this mere underling of Am Alisaar’s soldiers, yet he could not shake the absurd conviction from him.
He waved the Guard back a few paces and indicated to the man a stone bench. They sat together, and it bewildered Amrek that this did not disturb him. “Well, and if he’s one of my father’s spawn, I suppose he has a half right to be at my side. Is this what I feel then? An obscure brotherhood?”
“Well, soldier,” he said aloud, “what are you called?”
“Raldnor, my lord, Raldnor of Sar.”
“Indeed. Then I know you better than I thought.”
“The matter of your Guard, my lord. I humbly apologize for proving superior to the Chosen.”
“You’re playing a dangerous game, Sarite.”
“What other game is left me, my lord? Either your Councilor hangs me, or you do. I would only draw your attention to one thing—something Kathaos of Alisaar has failed to see.”
“Which is?”
“I’ve proved my excellence as a fighting machine. I could substitute for Ryhgon very well, and better, either in Kathaos’s guard, which is unlikely—or in your lordship’s.”
“This is the proposal of a drunkard or a fool.”
“And to ignore it would be the act of one. My lord.”
“Be careful what you say to me, Sarite.”
“One day, my lord, long after you’ve seen me dangle on a gallows, a man may slip a knife in your back or a powder in your cup, which I, had I been there, would have prevented.”
“You offer yourself as a bodyguard, then?”
Raldnor said nothing. The scents of the garden drifted about them.
“How did you find this place?” Amrek asked.
“I followed one of the Lady Astaris’s women. She was returning from a tryst, I think, and didn’t see me.”
“You’re too cunning, soldier. And you’ve too many enemies.”
“I can deal with my enemies, my lord, if I live. And yours, too.”
“I think,” Amrek said slowly, “that you, Sarite, had the same father as I.”
The face of the young man beside him seemed to harden almost imperceptibly, then relax.
“You don’t have an answer to that, I see.”
“My line is all Xarabian, my lord.”
“Not in your eyes. You have the mark of Rarnammon there.”
“Perhaps, my lord, we were honored, unknown, in some past generation.”
Amrek rose; Raldnor followed him.
“From this moment your trial has begun. No, not the gallows. I’ll give you what you claim a right to; then I’ll watch you earn it, and I promise you, you’ll be fighting for your life every inch of the way.”
“Good morning, Kathaos.”
Kathaos turned and bowed, and nothing about his attitude or his person betrayed his rancor or his unease.
“I called you to inform you of the whereabouts of a certain man—a Sarite. I think you know who I mean.”
“Indeed, my lord.”
“Indeed, Kathaos. He’s here. Of course, you’d assumed as much. Your hunter, who can defeat both your men and mine. Can you imagine what his fate will be?”
“I’ve a poor imagination, my lord,” Kathaos said, without inflection.
“Yes, you’ve already proved that conclusively. Well, I’ll tell you. I’ve pardoned your Sarite to save you the trouble. Look for him in a few days, and you will find he has become a Dragon Lord.”
“You base your hopes a good deal, my lord, on the man’s luck, which will one day desert him.”
Amrek smiled.
“All luck, Kathaos, comes to an end. Think of that sometime, when you lie in the bed of my mother.”
10
On a blue Xarabian morning of the warm months, the entourage of the Storm Lord and his bride left Lin Abissa.
It was to be a slow journeying—a miniature city on the move, equipped with all necessities and luxuries. Twilight found them between Ilah and Migsha on the empty slopes—a settling of tents like a flock of birds. When the moon rose, a herd of zeebas, galloping across the star-burned silences, fled from the red twinkling of their fires.
The messenger who had ridden all the way from Koramvis, and whose news had displeased Amrek, made inquiries over his meat.
“The light-eyed man in the Storm Lord’s tent—who’s he now?”