Tier found himself shaking in the dark as the story faded away. Next time he experimented with magic, he decided firmly, it would be with a story whose hero survived.
“What have you done, Bard?” said the voice from above him. “Magic for music, both becoming more real. What have you done?” And, severing the bond that still held him to Tier, the listener departed without a sound.
Avar, Sept of Leheigh, looked just as a Sept ought, thought Phoran, playing with his breakfast without enthusiasm.
Avar was lean, tall, and heroic. His face was chiseled, his chin firm and his mouth smiling sympathetically. He’d come, unannounced, into the royal bedchambers as if he had the right to be there.
“Not hungry this morning, my emperor?” he said, looking at the mess Phoran had made of his plate. “When I heard that you were breaking your fast in your room I thought that might be the case. My new man has a potion against drink-sickness. He’s a half-blood Traveler, or so he claims. He’s certainly a wizard with potions and medicines.”
“No, thank you,” Phoran looked down at his plate. Avar was home.
Relief and joy were severely tempered by his suspicion that Toarsen’s words last night were truth. Last night he’d been certain, but in Avar’s charismatic presence Phoran’s need for Avar’s approval vied with the words of a couple of half-drunken lords and scored a narrow triumph. Narrow enough that Phoran didn’t ask Avar to join him—although there were extra plates and plenty of food.
Phoran forked up a bit of fruit and ate it without enthusiasm. “I don’t need potions—I’m not sick from drinking.” It sounded too much like a pouting child, so Phoran continued speaking. “So you’re back from your sept already?” Did he sound casual enough? “I’d thought you intended to be gone longer than this?”
Avar looked disgruntled, Phoran thought, feeling a bare touch of triumph. Perhaps Avar had expected a warmer greeting—or even the scold Phoran’d intended to hand out to the Sept before overhearing that conversation last night. Cool composure wasn’t a mood the young emperor often indulged himself in.
“Where is Leheigh, anyway? In the South?” The indifference in Phoran’s voice was less of an effort. There. See how little I concern myself with your affairs?
He’d looked up the ancient deed in the library and followed the path on several of the maps in the map room. He could have discussed the crops in the Sept’s new inheritance with knowledge gained from poring over tax records of the past few centuries. But now he would not admit to knowing anything. Avar’s brother wouldn’t have dared to show such disgust for the Emperor if he had no encouragement from Avar himself.
But Phoran needed Avar. He needed his praise. He needed his support against the older council members who weren’t happy with an emperor who indulged himself in nightly parties, and yet they still refused to let him do anything more useful. Needed him because Avar, when he stayed at the palace, often slept in a bed in the Emperor’s suite—and when Avar was there, Phoran was safe.
“Leheigh is southwest, sire, along the Silver River below Shadow’s Fall,” said Avar, his face settling into its usual warmth. “I didn’t have time to visit the battlefield—but I will next time I go there, if I can find a guide. All in all, I’m very happy with the lands; my father wasn’t a hunter so he left the forest wild and filled with game. The keep dates back to a few centuries after Shadow’s Fall—the family legend claims that my many times great-grandfather was a solder of the Remnant of the Army of Man, and a few of those soldiers settled along the river after the final battle. There’s a couple of towns in the district, a largish village near my keep, and a smaller town on the banks of the river. The Redern villagers—that’s the smaller town—still talk as if the Fall of the Shadowed happened yesterday. I suppose because nothing interesting has happened there since.”
“I see,” said Phoran. “When did you get back?”
“The day before yesterday,” Avar said. “My apologies for not coming to you directly, but I had to make arrangements for some items I brought back.” He hesitated. “And, I came back and found that my mistress had a few extra men warming her bed while I was gone. By the time I dealt with that my temper was none too sweet.”
A good reason for waiting, thought Phoran with secret jubilation. Maybe Avar’s brother was jealous of the time Avar spent with him; maybe that’s why he’d said such hurtful things. Phoran could understand Toarsen’s jealousy.
“I thought I’d go riding today,” said Phoran, changing the subject as if Avar’s trip and return were something that held no interest. “Will you accompany me?” He hadn’t intended to ask for company. But Avar’s presence soothed the hurts Toarsen and Kissel had dealt. Avar was his friend—anyone could see it by the warmth of his gaze.
Avar’s eyebrows climbed up that perfect forehead. “Of course, my lord. I’ll send word to the stables. I left my horse at home.”
“I’ve done that already,” Phoran said, setting his fork aside. “You can ride the horse my armsman was to take.” He’d have no need of a guard with Avar by his side. “I feel as if I haven’t been out of the castle in months.” Only after he said it did he realize that it was true. When was the last time he’d been out? Oh, yes, that tavern crawl in disguise on Avar’s birthday four months before.
“Ah.” Avar frowned a little. “Is something bothering you?”
Phoran shook his head and stood up. “Just bored. Tell me about your new curiosity. A Traveler, you said. Is he a mage?”
Avar grinned, “Aren’t they all? But truthfully, I don’t think he has a drop of Traveler blood—he is, however, a skilled healer.”
And as they strode through the palace to the stables, Avar chatted cheerfully about his trip, not at all like a man talking to someone he held in contempt. Phoran wondered whether he should tell Avar what his brother had said—and decided not to. Not because he was afraid to hurt Avar, but because he didn’t want Avar to know that anyone held Phoran in contempt.
Under the cheerful flow of Avar’s attention, Phoran began to rethink the whole of last night’s debacle. It was traditional for people not to like their rulers—and he probably misunderstood what they were saying about his uncle. They hadn’t said that they had killed him, just that he had been killed. Phoran hadn’t been drunk, precisely, but he hadn’t exactly been sober either. It was easy to misinterpret things in that state.
Phoran relaxed and let himself revel in his hero’s company. It had been weeks since he’d had Avar’s undivided attention. His contentment was somewhat shaken when they brought his stallion to him.
Phoran, who had learned to ride as soon as he could walk, had to use a mounting block to attain the saddle.
Fat, indeed, he thought, red-faced as the stablemen who’d known him from the time he was a toddler fought not to meet his eyes. At least they had trusted him with his own stallion, who had responded with his usual fury to the weight of a rider—perhaps a little worse for having not been ridden for so many months.
By the time Blade quit fussing, Phoran was tired, quite certain he’d pulled a muscle in his back, and thoroughly triumphant. Not everyone could have stayed on such an animal, and he’d managed it. The stallion snorted and settled down as if the previous theatrics had never been.
“Nicely ridden, my emperor,” murmured Avar with just the proper amount of admiration to make the comment too much.
Phoran watched the stablemen’s faces change from approval to veiled contempt. Had Avar done that on purpose? thought the small hurt part of Phoran that was still writhing under Toarsen’s derision.
Avar had things to look after that evening, and Phoran did not follow his impulse to plead with Avar to stay. The ride had reminded him of his uncle, who had taught him horsemanship. His uncle, who would have been disappointed in the man Phoran had grown to be.
“You have brains, mi’lad,” he remembered his uncle saying. “Emperor or not. Use them.”
So it was that as darkness fell in his rooms and the flames in the f
ireplace died to bare glowing embers, Phoran was alone again when the Memory came.
It stood taller than a man and stopped some few feet away. Doubtless, Phoran thought with humor that barely masked his terror, it was taken aback that he was not in a drunken stupor or crying in the corner as he had been on more than one occasion.
It looked like nothing at all, as if a human eye couldn’t quite focus on what it was—though tonight it looked, somehow, more real than it had been before.
Its hesitation, if it had hesitated at all, was only momentary. For the first time, Phoran stood quietly as it enfolded him in its blackness, taking away his ability to move or cry out. He’d hoped that it would be better if he held still, but the burning pain of fangs piercing the inner skin of his elbow was as terrible as he remembered. Cold entered Phoran from the place where the Memory fed, as if it was replacing what it drank with ice. When it was done it said the words that had become too familiar.
“By the taking of your blood, I owe you. One answer. Choose your question.”
“Are you afraid of other people?” Phoran asked. “Is that why you don’t come if someone’s in the room with me?”
“No,” it said and vanished.
Shivering as if he’d been hunting in winter, Phoran the Twenty-Seventh curled up on the rug on the floor of his room.
CHAPTER 8
This time it wasn’t the grating that opened, but the door. Tier shot to his feet and had to stop there because the sudden light blinded him.
“If it please you, my lord,” said a soft tenor voice that could have belonged equally well to a young man or a woman, “Would you come with me? We have arranged for your comfort. I am to offer you also an apology for how you have been treated. We have not been ready to receive you until now.”
Tier wiped his eyes and squinted against the glare of what was, after all, a fairly dim lantern to see the backlit form of a woman.
The sight, he could tell, was staged. She held the light carefully to exhibit certain aspects of her form. The slight tremor in the hand that held the lantern might be faked as well—but he’d have been worried about facing a man who’d been caged for as long as Tier had, so he gave her the benefit of the doubt.
“I’m no lord,” he said at last. “Tell me just who it is I have to thank for my recent stay here?”
“If it please you, sir,” she said. “I’ll take you to where all of your questions can be answered.”
Tier could have overpowered her, and would have if she had been a man. But if they, whoever they were, sent a woman to get him, it could only be because overpowering her would get him nowhere.
“You’ll have to give me a moment,” he said, “until I can see again.”
As his vision cleared, he saw that the woman was arrayed in flowing garments that hinted broadly at the body beneath.
A whore’s costume, but this woman was no common whore. She was extraordinarily beautiful, even to a man who preferred his woman to be less soft and breakable. Even if the net of gems and gold that confined quite a bit of equally golden hair was paste and brass—and he wasn’t at all sure it was—the cloth of her dress was worth a fair penny.
“Can you see, yet, sir?” she asked.
“Oh aye,” he said congenially. He’d bide his time until he had enough information to act. “Lead on, fair lady.”
She laughed gently at his address as she led him out into a winding corridor. Behaving, he thought, as if he were a customer, rather than a man who’d been imprisoned for weeks.
The hall ceiling was so low he could have easily touched it with a hand. On either side of his cell there were doors that opened to his hand and revealed rooms that looked much like his. The woman was patient with him, waiting without murmuring and pausing with him when he stopped by an iron door twice as wide as the one that led into his cell. The door stuck fast when he tried it.
The woman said nothing. When he took the lantern from her and adjusted it brighter so he could look more closely at the doors, she merely folded her arms under her full breasts.
He ignored her until he was certain that the door was hinged on the other side, with two iron bars (barely visible in the narrow space between door and frame) in place to keep the door shut. If he’d access to a forge he could fashion something to unbar the door—but they were unlikely to allow him such.
He handed the lantern back to his hostess and allowed her to lead him.
The hall continued around a sharp bend and ended in double doors. Just before the walls ended, there was a door on either side. It was the left-hand door the woman opened, stepping back for him to precede her.
The smell of steam and the sound of running water emerged from the opened door, so he was unsurprised to enter a bathing room. He knew what one looked like because the Sept of Gerant had held war conferences in his—saying that the sound of the water kept people from overhearing anything useful. But that austere chamber had as much to do with this one as a donkey had with a warhorse. A golden tub of a size to accommodate five or six was brim full of hot, steaming water with a tall table near it holding a variety of soaps and pots of lotion. But by far the most impressive part of the room was the cold pool.
Water cascaded from an opening in the ceiling high above and poured onto a ledge of fitted rock where it was spread to fall in a wide sheet to the waist-deep pool below. He could tell the pool was waist-deep because there were two naked, frightened, and obviously cold women standing in it.
“Sssst,” hissed his guide in sudden irritation. “You look as if you are about to lose your virtue again. Does this look like a man who’d hurt women?”
She softened her voice to velvet and turned back to Tier. “You’ll forgive them, my… sir. Our last guest was none to happy with his captivity and took it out on those who had nothing to do with it.”
He laughed with honest amusement. “After that speech I would certainly feel like a stupid lout to try any such thing,” he said.
In the brighter light of the bathing chamber he could see that she was more than beautiful—she was fascinating, a woman who’d draw men’s eyes when she was eighty. He mentally upped her probable price again. So why was he being offered such service? The thought pulled the smile from his face.
“So I’m to clean myself before being presented, eh?” he said neutrally.
“We will perform that service, sir, if you will allow us,” she said, bowing her head in submission. “When you are finished bathing, there are clean clothes to replace the ones you wear now. This is for your comfort entirely. If you choose, you may stay as you are and I’ll take you in now. I thought you would prefer not to appear at a disadvantage.”
“Disadvantage, eh?” He glanced at his clothes. “If they kidnap a man at the tail end of a three-month hunt, they get as they deserve. I’ll wash, but you ladies get yourselves out of here or my wife will have my head.”
The women in the pool giggled as if he’d been witty, but they waited for a gesture from the woman he’d followed before they left the pool. They wrapped themselves in a couple of the bathing sheets folded in piles on a bench and exited the room through the same door he’d entered.
“You too, lass,” he told his guide. “The high-born you serve may be comfortable with help, but we Rederni are competent to wash ourselves.”
Smilingly she bowed and left, shutting the door behind her. He hadn’t noticed a latch, but he heard a click that could be nothing else so he didn’t bother to try the door. The waterfall was more intriguing.
Four leaps gave him a fingerhold on the lowest ledge and he climbed the rest with relative ease. When he found the opening the water fell through in the corner of the ceiling, it was grated with iron bars set in mortar.
He slid back down and splashed uncaring of his battered clothing into the cold pool of water. He hadn’t expected such an obvious way out, but he needed to know what he dealt with. Eventually he’d manage a way out—in the meantime there was no need for filth.
He washed the
clothes on his body first, then threw them into the waiting hot tub, where he’d soap down both them and himself when he was ready.
The cold water poured over his face, clearing his head and his thoughts as he scraped away dirt.
He hadn’t heard anyone enter, but when he stepped out from the waterfall, there were clean clothes waiting for him.
He ignored them and settled into the tub of hot water, soaped himself off, and gave rough service to his clothes. Rinsing everything in the cold pool, he draped his clothes where he could. Shivering now, he dried himself and examined the clothing she’d left for him.
It was serviceable clothing, very like the filthy garments he’d taken off, though less worn. He fingered the shirt thoughtfully before donning it. The leather boots fit him as well as his old ones, lost somewhere during his captivity.
As he tied the laces of his boots, his guide returned, her timing too accurate for guessing. Someone had been watching him—he hoped they enjoyed the show. She held a tray with a comb and a plain silver clip and held them out. He ran the comb through his hair and pulled it back into a queue which he fastened with the clip.
He turned around once for her perusal and she nodded. “You’ll do, sir. If you’ll follow me, the Master awaits your presence.”
“Master?” he asked.
But she’d given him all the information she intended to. “Come,” she said, leading him back to the corridor.
The double doors at the end of the hall were open this time and a haze of smoke drifted into the corridor along with a desultory drumbeat and a hum of conversation. But he had only a moment to glance inside and get an impression of some sort of public room with tables and benches scattered around, before the woman opened the door directly across from the bathing room and gestured him in.
In size and lack of windows, the room resembled the cell Tier had been living in, though here the stone floor was covered with a tightly woven rug that cushioned his feet. A pair of matching tapestries hung on one wall. The only furnishings in the room were two comfortable-looking chairs flanking a small round table.
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