I reached my hand out for the jug, but all he did was shake his head and continue to stare at me. After a minute I took my hand back, and admitted to myself that I had no choice. I needed his help no matter what I’d said, and he knew it as well as I did. I moved forward again to where he was sitting, and watched a faint grin appear on his face.
“When one cannot use a weapon, one may as well not have it,” he observed, tilting the jug over his hand to let the lotion flow out. “You are willful and disobedient to a large degree, undoubtedly because of your power, and yet any woman may be taught to obey him to whom she belongs, should the matter be pursued strongly enough., We cannot begin your quest till darkness has fallen, therefore may we concern ourselves with other matters for the time.”
He rubbed his hands together to spread the lotion on both of them, then proceeded to cover the areas of me he hadn’t yet touched. I’d never before thought of myself as easy, but Daldrin was almost as bad as Tammad when it came to resisting him. I’d been able to accept most of what he’d done to me earlier, but he brought the memory of that back and added to it so thoroughly that I soon found myself in his lap, kissing at him and trying to talk him into taking off those red leather slave pants he had on. He laughed softly as he ran his hands all over me, making me squirm against his chest as I kissed him, making me willing to do anything if only he would satisfy me. Once we reached that point he took me in his arms and kissed me deeply, then began making me pay for what I wanted. His price was unreasonably high but he still took all of it, and it was a long time before I could think coherently again.
When I left the bath chamber, dressed in my new blue gown, Daldrin followed after me with his head down and a tightlipped expression on his face. I didn’t know why he had chosen to look that way until the members of my guard began ragging him, telling him how delicately lovely and well-used he looked, and how satisfied his dendaya looked. It then came to me that the guardsmen might have grown suspicious if he hadn’t looked that way—after all, we’d been in the bath chamber alone together an awfully long time, and if he hadn’t satisfied me in all that time, he’d be in for replacement and punishment. I put a smug, self-satisfied look on my face to match the hang-dog one on Daldrin, and kept it there until we got back to my rooms.
Once we were inside with the doors closed, Daldrin patted my bottom in approval and went to check the other room to make sure we were alone. I felt very impatient over the fact that it was only just sundown, and prowled around the reception room while Daldrin lighted the candles. We couldn’t begin our escape attempt until well after dark, when most of the people in the palace would be settled down for the night, and even the tray of food brought by a slave a few minutes later didn’t distract me. I was ready to ignore it completely, but Daldrin had other ideas. He forced me to sit down and eat what he gave me, keeping the strap he had found well in view while I did so. He grinned at the way I glared at him between bites, but there was nothing I could do to wipe that grin off his face. If I started raking him over the coals by twisting his emotions, he’d be useless when I needed him the most.
The minutes and hours dragged by so slowly I was ready to scream, but Daldrin was entirely untouched by tension of any sort. His big body lay stretched out on the carpet fur, his blond head propped up on a cushion, his eyes closed and his mind dozing lightly. I sat down in one corner and tried to match his calm, but without using self-hypnosis I couldn’t do it. So many things could go wrong that night, so many little things—and so many big things. I was up and pacing again before I knew it, but not before Daldrin knew it. It was the third or fourth time my pacing had broken into his doze, and he was finally annoyed enough to do something about it. Against my will I was forced to lie down next to him, held tightly in his arms so that I couldn’t pace and he could sleep. I was tempted to sink my teeth into one of those massive, ridiculously strong arms that held me prisoner, but Daldrin still had that strap and was annoyed enough to use it on me, leaving me no choice but to grit my teeth and lie still. I don’t know how it happened, but in a very few minutes I was asleep, too.
I woke up when Daldrin did, and it was clear from the alertness in his mind that it was time for us to be moving. We spent a couple of minutes going over our plans one last time, then I went to the doors to my room while Daldrin stood well back. I didn’t need to open the doors to know there were four guards out there, but the guards were an expected presence. What I was checking for was unexpected presences, up and down the corridor as far as I could reach. A quick, thorough search revealed no living mind within my range, and that was all I’d been waiting to learn. The guards were the only ones to be taken care of, and that was my job.
Slowly, gently, I reached out to the four minds, finding the boredom that filled them all, increasing it carefully before injecting sleepiness. I heard a yawn through the doors, and then another, and then the sounds of men sitting down to get comfortable on a dull, routine job. They weren’t supposed to be sitting down, of course, but the dash of indifference I’d fed them made it all not worth worrying about. Their indifference and boredom increased, and then their sleepiness, and in another few minutes they were all snoring softly, asleep and likely to stay that way.
I turned to Daldrin and gestured him closer, glad he’d had the sense not to argue when I’d told him I wanted him well out of range of any stray projections. He was at the doors in an instant and opening one of them carefully, then both of us were out in the corridor with the door closed behind us, tiptoeing past the sleeping guards. We were on our way to the servant quarters, where Len and Garth were being held, and that was what I’d needed Daldrin for. I didn’t know the way to the place they were being kept, and without Daldrin I could have wandered all night without coming anywhere near them.
Daldrin led me down the corridor a long way before he stopped at a single closed door and opened it carefully. Behind the door was a stairway leading down, and we took it without anyone showing up to wonder why a servant-slave was sneaking around in the middle of the night with an important-looking female trotting along behind him. We had argued about that point, Daldrin and I, back in the bathing chamber when I’d been able to argue again. Daldrin had insisted that I couldn’t wander around the servant-slave area in a gown and not attract the sort of attention we didn’t need. He’d wanted me to go naked, pretending to be a female slave either on her way to or coming back from being raped, but I didn’t like his grin. I wouldn’t have put it past him to arrange a false alarm, and then rape me himself just to make our act look good. Happily, all I’d had to do was ask him how many dark-haired slaves the palace boasted of, and he’d had to concede the point. Anyone seeing me would know who I was, naked or clothed to the teeth. The only thing for it was to make sure no one saw me.
There was no door at the bottom of the stairway, only an arch that opened onto a narrow corridor cut into the dirt and rock walls. Torches sputtered in rusty iron holders on the walls, illuminating the worn, dirty stone floor just enough to let us see where we were going. The air smelled stale and rancid, from old cooking odors and sweat and pain. Pain has its own smell when you live in a world of emotions, but I’d never realized that until I’d come to Rimilia.
Daldrin moved along the corridor to the left, his mind eager to leap ahead despite the restraining hand I had on his arm. I was letting my mind pull ahead of both of us, searching for anyone still awake, but the only traces I touched were the exhausted minds of slaves, deep in a sleep of escape. We passed archway after archway, some of them slaves’ quarters, some of them punishment rooms, some of them eating rooms or training rooms, all of them smaller than the one Daldrin pointed out as the kitchen. All the cooking for the palace was done there, and it seemed large enough for fifty people to work in and still have room to spare, but fascinating as it was, we weren’t there on a guided tour. We passed the four kitchen entrances quickly, and went on to the area that quartered the kitchen slaves.