by Victor Poole
"I knew master played a deep game," Philas said slowly, "but I did not suspect this."
"Well," Ajalia said. "You know we could have started back by now."
"Yes," Philas admitted. The caravan had been arranged to last anywhere from six months to a year; once the slaves had reached Slavithe, it had become clear that they could clear themselves of their goods in a month, or less. "And no one knew," Philas asked, "but you?"
"No one knows," Ajalia said. "Not in the East, not here."
Philas reached out and took Ajalia's hand. Delmar watched the male slave closely, but did not move.
"Are you all right?" Philas asked her. Ajalia nodded, moving her head very little.
"I am fine," she said in a hollow voice. Delmar shifted. The long conversation in the oily Eastern tongue was making a kind of glazed look come into his eyes. Philas glanced at the Thief Lord's oldest son, and then looked back at Ajalia.
"I will have to leave," Philas warned her. "I'll go east, to Saroyan."
"I know," she said. She had told him this would be so, some time ago, but he had ascribed her words to a fear of the Thief Lord, and to a nervousness about the trade.
"There will be war," he told her. She said nothing, her eyes on the twisted roots beneath her. Philas sighed, and pressed his lips against Ajalia's hand. "I am sorry," Philas said in the Slavithe language to Delmar. "She belongs with you. I was jealous. I wish only for Ajalia's happiness."
Ajalia smiled at Delmar, and at Philas. Delmar watched Philas like a hawk.
"You are sweet," Ajalia said to Philas in the Eastern tongue, "but Delmar is not so stupid as that."
"Does he know what you come here for?" Philas asked in the Eastern language. Ajalia shook her head.
"No," she said. "He does not know." And he will never know, she added to herself.
Delmar was watching them, his eyes narrowed, his lips moving slowly along with the sounds they made with their mouths. Ajalia touched Delmar's chin, and he smiled at her.
"I will come for you," Philas told her in the Eastern tongue. "When it is over, I will come."
"I will not live," Ajalia said. "I thought I might, before this." She gestured at the hollow, and the sunlight that was drifting cheerfully over the bandages on her arms. "Now," she said with a smile, and she spoke in the Slavithe language, "I am resigned to my fate." Delmar glanced at her sharply. Ajalia could see that he wanted to ask her what fate she meant; she was grateful that he kept his questions to himself, for now. Ajalia laughed. She inched away from Delmar's embrace, and moved onto her hands and knees.
"We are a fine picture, the three of us," she told Philas in the Eastern tongue. "I shall cut myself in two, and you can carry one half home to master."
Delmar and Philas regarded her soberly, their faces drawn into serious and grim lines. Ajalia set her limbs carefully down against a flat space in the tree roots, settling her back against the rim of the hollow.
"What did she say?" Delmar asked Philas.
"She doesn't like crying," Philas told Delmar. "I'll leave you the horse," he told Ajalia.
"Take Leed," Ajalia said swiftly in the Eastern tongue. "Put him together with Darien," she told Philas. "Things are moving faster than I thought they would," she admitted. "I don't want the boys caught up in this." Philas nodded. He took Ajalia's hand in both of his, and pressed his lips against her skin.
"I am sorry," he told her, and Ajalia's back hurt at the sound of his voice as it curved through the thick twists of the Eastern tongue. She shook her head, telling him not to be sorry. "I am," Philas insisted. His eyes caught her gaze, and the sincerity in his face made her lips tremble. "I am sorry," he said again. He pressed his forehead against her hand, and held it there for a moment. Delmar stared at the pair of them, his mouth a little open. Ajalia knew he was going to ask her what Philas was saying to her, as soon as the male slave was gone, and she did not know what she was going to tell the Thief Lord's oldest son.
"Goodbye," Philas murmured. He did not look at her again. Ajalia felt as though her heart were wrenching in two. She thought of the papers she had found in Lim's secret box, and said nothing.
LEED IS SENT AWAY
Philas nodded to Delmar, and hopped over the edge of the hollow. In a moment, his bobbing back was out of sight among the trees. Tears were rising up in Ajalia's eyes; she blinked them away. She remembered suddenly that Philas had called her Jay, when she had first woken up, and that she hadn't told him not to. She took a shuddering breath.
"What fate?" Delmar asked, as soon as Philas was out of earshot. Ajalia shook herself a little, and examined the bindings on her right arm.
"Have we changed these?" she asked brightly. Delmar caught her neck in his large hand, and pressed his face against her cheek.
"You are not okay," he told her sternly. The floodgates of sorrow she had held in check up to this point gave a serious quake. She closed her eyes, and commanded the tears to go away.
"It is nothing," she said. "Only I miss home." She meant, I miss the East, I miss master, and I miss the simple, linear way events used to unfold. Delmar folded her up into his arms, and put his hand in the hollow of her neck, where her chin ran against her cheek. He did not speak to her, and after a long moment of waiting for him to interrogate her, she realized that he was not going to.
"Why are you being kind to me?" she asked.
"Because I love you," he said promptly. She laughed shakily.
"You are not supposed to love me," she told him. "I am going to break your heart."
"I don't care," Delmar said. "You can have all the secrets you like. You can even leave me for Philas someday, and have a family of little dark-haired Philases, and I will still love you. I will love you forever. You won't get rid of me with scary secrets."
I will, Ajalia thought to herself, and sighed.
"You say that now," she said firmly, "but you have never had your heart broken."
"I was born with a broken heart," Delmar said serenely. "You cannot possibly make my heart worse than it already is."
Ajalia drew back from him, and examined his eyes.
"Why are you doing this?" she asked. "You are supposed to be suspicious. You are supposed to be jealous. You are supposed to be stomping around in the forest and shouting at me for betraying you."
"Have you betrayed me?" Delmar asked easily.
"No," she said.
"Then why should I be angry, or feel anything at all?" he asked sensibly. "You have some grand secret, and you can keep it if you like. I have my own secrets," he added importantly. Ajalia laughed, but he regarded her without rancor. "You are alive right now," he pointed out, and she stopped laughing.
"That is true," she admitted. She did not add that since he had healed her with his strange white light, she felt as if her entire spinal column had been ripped out, and replaced with razor wire and glass.
"And you love me," Delmar added, moving swiftly against her, and kissing at her jaw. The smell of his skin, as ever, made her heart flip over clumsily. She caught her breath, and put her hand on Delmar's chest.
"You're all bloody," she observed.
"Lim is on my shirt," Delmar explained.
"I remember," she said. A sudden desire to remove Delmar's clothing struck her, and she considered it. "Are we alone?" she asked. Delmar shrugged.
"I don't know," he said. "I thought no one came out this far, but now it's a regular thoroughfare."
"Why didn't the metheros screech at Philas?" she asked him. He grinned, and caressed her cheek.
"They did," he said with relish. "They screamed for hours. You missed the whole thing. Philas wouldn't leave, and they threw feces at him." Delmar's eyes were bright with glee as he reflected on the spectacle that Ajalia had missed. "They finally stopped," Delmar said, "sometime in the first night. They'd been at it for hours and hours. I thought Philas was going to go insane. He wanted to hunt them all down and kill them, but I stopped him."
A shadowy pulse was beating, thrumming
regularly, just beneath her ribs, near where the poisoned dart had pierced her. She had a strange premonition that the boy Leed was going to appear at any moment. She wanted to kiss Delmar, but not if she was going to be interrupted suddenly. Her body ached with the protest of breathing, of living. She thought that kissing Delmar would make the aches ease away, but she did not think that she could stand to feel better, and then worse again, if she had to pull away from Delmar's mouth in the middle of holding him close.
"What happened to Lim?" Ajalia asked.
"We buried him in some leaves and fallen logs," Delmar told her. He gestured deeper into the forest. "Back there," he said. He did not explain why he had not taken the body to the poison tree, and Ajalia did not ask. She was sure Delmar was still trying to hide the magic from Philas, and she was sure that Delmar thought the poison tree was magic.
"I think Leed is going to leave Philas to look for me," Ajalia said.
"Leed hasn't been out here," Delmar assured her. "He stayed with the black horse, where Philas came in from the road."
"Philas said he was leaving the horse for me," Ajalia reminded him. "And the boy wants money. I promised him money, before. He'll come and look for me, if Philas doesn't send him with the horse."
They sat in silence. Ajalia thought deeply about standing up.
"I don't want Philas to know things that I don't know," Delmar said. "He makes me nervous."
"Well," Ajalia said. She didn't know what to say to this. She wished that Delmar had taken Lim's body to the poison tree. She had a sick feeling that she was going to regret not destroying evidence of the Thief Lord's slave's body. With a sigh, she stretched out her knees.
"Are you going somewhere?" Delmar asked.
"Do you have my bag?" she asked him. He clambered up the trunk of one of the trees that formed the hollow, and retrieved the pouch that held Ajalia's things from a high notch.
"Here," he said, dropping down and handing it across to her. Ajalia pulled a handful of coins out of the bottom of the bag.
"Come and help me," Ajalia said. She held out her arms towards Delmar; he put himself around her at once. His mouth was in her hair. She stifled a sigh, and leaned away from him against the lip of the hollow. Slowly, she lifted her legs over the bark. Her abdomen felt twisted inside, and her legs shook. Delmar jumped over the hollow and put his hands around her waist. When Ajalia's feet touched the ground, she tested her legs. She was tired, and she was in an irritating state of constant hurt, but she thought she could walk. Ajalia took a step into the thick forest, her hands wound around Delmar's arm.
"Where are we going?" Delmar asked her.
"To find Leed," Ajalia said. "He won't be far." She wanted to keep the location of the hollow to herself; she knew that if Leed found out where Delmar's hiding place was, the boy would look on it as his own. Her mind was a confused map of items. She had told Philas to take Leed to Talbos, and yet she was planning around the boy, trying to decide what she would do with him later in the day. She had almost forgotten about the horse, and she knew that Delmar had said something, she couldn't remember quite what, about Card and the collection of servants in Slavithe.
They came to the place where the big tree split into two; Ajalia looked at the place where Lim had lain. The undergrowth was crushed a little. She couldn't see the blood. Ajalia drifted to the side, her vision clouding over. Delmar put his arms around Ajalia, and held her upright.
"Sorry," she said, leaning against him.
"You'll be fine," Delmar said. "Walking will help, I think."
"You're not so protective today," Ajalia observed lightly.
"I am," Delmar said. He walked along with her, supporting her weight.
"You probably want to know all about what I said," Ajalia prompted. Delmar helped her walk through the tall grasses and wild undergrowth between the trees. "What I said to Philas," she added.
"No," Delmar said. "I would find it upsetting. And you love me, not him, so I don't care."
Ajalia looked at Delmar's face; his pale cheeks were ruddy with blood, and his eyes were bright.
"Why are you doing this?" she asked.
"You can ask me that over and over again," Delmar said, helping her over a tangle of bush, "and it will always be the same answer.'
"That you love me," Ajalia guessed. Delmar kissed her briefly.
"Yes, little bird," he said. They wound through the forest, passing away from the area of the forest where the screeching metheros nested. Ajalia still had not seen the loud creatures. She asked Delmar again what had happened when she had blacked out.
"I don't think you'll believe me," Delmar told her.
"Okay," she said.
"I put a piece of me into you. It drove the poison out." Delmar was holding her hand; she could feel shivers of fever still clinging to the edges of her skin.
"Is that why you look pale and bruised?" Ajalia asked.
"Do I?" Delmar asked. He sounded delighted. "Does it suit me?" he asked. Ajalia laughed at him.
"You are ridiculous," she told him. Leed came into sight; the boy was lurking behind a cluster of trees, his bright eyes glancing towards the road. Leed saw Ajalia, and his mouth parted in a determined stream of speech.
"You said I was going to teach you," Leed said. "I won't go with Philas. I have to stay and teach you."
"Here," Ajalia said, thrusting the handful of coins at the boy. "I release you early from the bargain. Go away, and don't die."
"No," Leed said. He examined Ajalia, his eyes narrowed shrewdly. "You're doing something," Leed said. "You're doing something dangerous. I want in."
"No," Ajalia said.
"I'll run away from Philas," Leed told her. "I'll run away again and again. You might as well keep me here so that I can see you and teach you the old Slavithe."
"No," Ajalia said. "Where's Philas?"
"He thinks I'm bringing you the horse," Leed said carelessly. Ajalia blinked.
"Right," she said. "Where is he?" She meant the horse. Leed folded his lips up into a furious snarl.
"I hid the horse," Leed said. "I hid him, and he will starve to death and die if you don't keep me here."
Ajalia stared at Leed; Leed stared back. She watched the glint in his eyes.
"Philas is waiting for you," she said. Delmar stood near her, his arm a little outstretched; Ajalia could see that he was waiting for her to fall down again. She began to laugh. "Fine," she said. "Go and tell Philas I'm keeping you," she told the boy. "He won't believe you, so tell him I said so."
"What if he says I'm lying?" Leed asked. She shrugged.
"Then he'll carry you off to Talbos, and I'll see you when you run away," she told the boy. Leed grinned fiercely at her.
"The black horse is in a cave just south of here," he told her, "across the road."
"There aren't caves around here," Ajalia said, closing her eyes. She was resetting her mental plans, reorganizing where she was going next. She was filtering through, one by one, the plans that she had made before the forest, and Delmar, and the strange, ever-present weakness that still had her in its grip.
"I'll show you," Delmar said.
"There are caves?" Ajalia asked.
"Just the one," Delmar said.
"I'm going to take these," Leed announced, slipping the coins out of Ajalia's hand. She let him take them, and watched him scurry through the trees towards the road.
"Now," Ajalia said firmly, turning to Delmar and winding her arms around his neck, "we are alone."
Delmar laughed at her.
"We must rescue that poor horse," he told her. She looked at him; her heart turned over, and then crumbled into a kind of white ash.
"Show me," she said. He went out in the direction Leed had gone. Ajalia let him go ahead of her; she did not want to lean on him any longer. She felt betrayed and abandoned. She felt angry. She wanted to shout at Delmar for several hours. She vaguely thought about Philas coming back. She would ask Philas to punch Delmar for her. This thought failed to
make her feel better, and she put her feet one ahead of the other, her eyes fixed on the ground. A metallic pumping was in her head, taking up all the space between her temples.
Delmar led her across the stretch of white road, and into the trees on the other side. The forest outside Slavithe stretched in a wide band all around the front part of the white walls. There was the city, and there were the city walls, and then there was a stretch of bland desert for some twenty yards, between the wall and the forest. The forest closed in against the white wall further down, and ran along the wall until the wall met the great black mountains. The hole in the wall that Delmar had brought her out through was within this stretch of forest. Beyond the swath of trees and thick undergrowth, the farmlands and cultivated fields began, and stretched throughout the long, dripping valley floor, all the way up to the lips of the desert that swallowed up all the moisture beyond into a sea of bronze sand and harsh rock.
"Are there springs out there?" Ajalia asked. "Out by the fields, and the orchards?"
"No," Delmar called over his shoulder. He glanced back at her, to see that she was still moving all right on her own. Ajalia told herself that Delmar was a heartless individual, and a horrible, selfish man. It was the first time that she thought of him as a man, but she didn't notice this distinction. Before this moment, she had called Delmar a young man, or a foolish boy, in her reflections to herself. Now, he seemed to her a man. He was, she told herself firmly, a man she did not like, but she did, at any rate, think of him now as a man.
She could not determine Delmar's age. He had a face and a figure that defied pigeonholing; he was powerful, and broad, and, unless he was near his father or mother, his face had a mobility, and an expression that changed almost him into different people, depending on the circumstance. Ajalia could not place his years; he might have been on the cusp of manhood, a boy of eighteen or nineteen, and he might have been a man of thirty-two. She had asked him before, and he had replied with a question of his own. Dishonest, Ajalia added to the litany of complaints she was compiling against Delmar. Disingenuous, she added vindictively. She did not notice that she was watching his calves and his hips with a hungry expression as he walked through the trees.
