Dragonfly
Page 46
I eased my grasp. He reached his own hand to turn my face. His mouth parted at my touch, in the intent if not the completion of a kiss, and his fingers curved, shaping my cheek. As he had done in the night with every inch of me, first tentatively, fearfully, then delicately, almost incredulously, the whole thundercloud of rage and denial dispelled, leaving only tenderness.
I could hear him smiling when he spoke, against my mouth.
“My precious tyrant. It grieves me to rebel.” The amusement faltered. “But this is not Amberlight. And it would grieve me more to leave you, in this place—open to—to—”
“Dishonor?” I could not help but sigh.
“Especially when you are—were—”
“A virgin? Who’s been ‘deflowered’? Such peculiar words your people use. Do you think a woman’s a sort of rosetree? What about the thorns?”
He laughed. Smothered for silence, but the chest-deep outbreak I had heard first among Iskarda’s rocks. “Oh, Chaeris—! What does Iskarda call it, then?”
“A woman’s first passage with a man? We say, moon-free, if we say anything. What matters is when your courses begin. You’re a woman, then. Come of age. You can use your body as you please.”
I slid my arm further over him, and rolled a fraction closer, all my senses recording for Two to keep: the firm warmth of muscle and bone, the shape of that deep narrow chest and haunches, the mixed scent of dust and some half-eroded spice that spoke from his skin and hair, his alone. The night’s common residue: human heat and contact and passion. Sweat. Salt. Sex.
Then I drew my hand slowly up his spine, and let my arm go loose, so the motion spoke for me. You are right. Time is undefeatable. It is time to go.
He kissed me once more, cupping my face double-handed, leaning over me, still too spent and sated from the night’s joy to do more than acknowledge the coming grief. Then he slid carefully out of the bed, and left me alone.
* * * *
Assessing matters by daylight, I had to admit he was right. I had heard him order cans of hot water, since there was no bath, but though he had left his lovebite discreetly on my breast, even after washing my hair was a rat’s nest, my lips felt bee-stung, and I was convinced the beard chafe showed on my cheeks. Worse still, I could picture the expression, smug and wholly indelible, on my face.
Therkon himself was worse. “Scowl,” I muttered as we met in the tap-room door. There was no time for embarrassment. “Scowl now and then. Otherwise everybody’ll know what you’ve been
doing.”
He raised a princely eyebrow. His lovebite lay behind a buttoned shirt collar, his hair had been combed out, and he was shaved. But the thunderous aura of yesterday had vanished, and if the night’s release, the passion, when he thought I was ready for it, the outright abandon, were no longer visible, the ease and serenity and unconscious almost-smile remained.
“What,” he murmured, “have I been doing?”
“Segil called it, getting your rocks off. That’s just how you look!”
The supercilious expression collapsed. He managed not to clap a hand to his mouth, but I nearly fell apart myself at the strangled whoop.
But the tap-room was already public, forcing us toward
decorum, however counterfeit. Making us suppress memory, and forego all the silly lovers’ behaviour, the compulsion to link hands, rub shoulders, lock eyes, even touch boots under the table. Let alone the foolish escape of euphoria in stupid grins and involuntary jests.
By the time we lugged our gear down the landing stage to join three women with market greens and a man with a basket of fish, the social blankness was less and less counterfeit. Balancing on the raft-cum-punt that shuttled us to another untidy landing, hunting halfway decent mounts among the four or five dejected horses by a thatched shelter, haggling with the hireman . . . Setting foot to stirrup, I already ached. With the memory of love, and the need to touch, caress, re-affirm it, and the understanding, colder and colder, that it could not happen. I had demanded one night, and only one night. Whatever it built between us, that night was gone.
Raised a crown prince, Therkon had learnt to mask every
feeling in the hardest of schools. Whatever he felt now, he gave me courtesy immaculate and cool as spring water, and as chilling. As if the Isles, let alone the night, had never happened at all.
* * * *
Though technically within the Delta, the ferry landed well east of Riversend. Our sluggish mounts plodded half the morning over plashy tracks, then wagon-muddy roadways, then something like a thoroughfare, before we ever reached the city’s penumbra of tumbledown shacks and the actual eastern gates. By then we were in a stream of riders, carts, wagons, pedestrians, people, eyes everywhere. The man with fish had hired a mount at the landing, and tagged within earshot from the start. We had never been able to drop the masks. We had never again been alone.
The gates were just a towering set of pylons and a pair of decorative city guards, between which the traffic stream constricted and then spread unimpeded onto half-cobbled streets. The outer slums. We rode together, we exchanged words when needed, for direction, or warning. Nothing else.
Next came the merchants’ quarter, where our dusty clothes looked more out of place. And then the lords’ part, the streets of great mansions and expensive shops and exclusive eating places, that would give on the imperial quarter proper. At that gate Therkon would finally be recognized. It would be the end of incognitos. The true end of the Isles. Dhasdein would take us back, swallow us, whole.
I had made a bargain, for what seemed the best I could get. Even if I sued to renege, even if his own resolution crumbled, the best it could bring would be a half-life, secluded in the palace,
furtive assignations, worse and worse deceit. And when he
married in truth . . .
Like Therkon, I had made my own trap. Unlike Therkon, I had no-one to break me out.
But if I held to the bargain it was worse. We Saw the full
horror before us then, recognition for Therkon, for us both,
comprehension of our success. Welcome, growing more and more ecstatic and more public, not merely family greetings but
proclamations, celebrations, ceremonies, probably thanksgiving to the Dhasdein gods. I would not be merely a foreign asset, but a hero, the Seer of Iskarda.
And with every piling acknowledgement of our glory, Therkon would become more wholly the crown prince. Locked in an ever-broadening wall of witnesses, servants, ceremony, officials, urgent imperial business. When he eluded that, I would have to ride, sit, talk, go to banquets and ceremonies, eat, drink, do everything but sleep beside him. The very force of public gratitude would compel it. I would have to share it all. Even while I could never be as much to him as troublecrew. Forget assignations. I could never kiss, touch, even speak to him informally, let alone show love or make love with him, ever again.
When the Imperial wall emerged above the latest clean, tree-lined, lightly trafficked avenue, I could bear no more. I reined in. Therkon noticed at once. As he drew his horse near I spoke hastily, muffled for his ear alone.
“I have to go.”
“What is it?” His eye raked me for overt signs of illness,
pallor, a fever sweat. “Is it your courses? Early?” Six months with a female way-friend had inured him to knowledge most Outland men would sooner die than admit. “Cramp . . .?”
“Not cramp. Not courses. I just have to go.” I shut my eyes and tried to breathe. To put it all in words would have been worse than a knife in the heart. “I can’t go any further. I have to go . . . home.”
“But . . .”
He stopped in mid-breath. His public face was perfect, but he was still Therkon. He had shared the night, and the weeks before, and the Isles, and all that our journey meant. And he had kept his wits, his intuition, as well.
The elegant traffic moved around us
, ladies or courtesans in carriages or palanquins, lords and courtiers ahorse or on wheels. At any moment someone really would recognize him, there would be a blaze of question and exclamation, and then the ordeal would be beyond escape.
He put one hand out. The barest motion, toward my wrist. And withdrawn. His eyes shut a moment. Then he set a heel to his horse and finished, just audible.
“I will take you to the wharf.”
The upRiver wharves, he meant. Where we would find freshwater freighters. Where I might buy a passage to Marbleport.
All through the tumbling, crowded city, we never spoke. Only, somehow, we managed to keep the horses together. So we were near, even if we never touched.
We dismounted at the inner fringe of shipping offices, such a familiar ambience now, that faced the River itself. Therkon tied the horses, I hefted my belongings. We walked together, out onto the wide, bustling quay, with the grey waters beyond.
The third office offered passages, “UpRiver, all destinations, domestic and foreign.” Even, when we enquired of the clerk
behind the modest marble counter, beyond Verrain.
Therkon drew out the gem pouch, with the last money he had changed for a finghend in Prospect. Dhasdein silver, Archipelago coinage. When I realized I had thought “Archipelago” and not “Isles,” it was a stab all of its own.
Used to motley currencies, the clerk counted and sorted and asked, hardly looking up, “Both parties? UpRiver, or up and back?”
Therkon said, “One person. UpRiver.” He sounded almost
normal. But I saw the muscles move in his throat.
If we had been ordinary people I could still have touched his hand, we could have exchanged concerns and injunctions, have hugged if not kissed. I swallowed the boulder that had suddenly filled my own throat. All the concentration, all the courage I had was bent on bearing this to the end. On parting, saying farewell, without breaking down. Without clutching him, or begging for
impossibilities. Or just starting to weep.
“You’re in luck,” the clerk was telling the counter-top. “Dhanissa’s just loading deck cargo. They’re set to catch the midday tide.”
Because of course the River would be tidal, almost to the outskirts of Riversend.
Distantly I heard Therkon, still deploying his Dhasdeini
merchant mask, making arrangements for baggage, provisions, asking about cabins, a necessary, days estimated for the trip. The ship-line or owner. The clerk answering, “Consort line. They work out of Marbleport.”
Final, cruelest good fortune. The ship was one of Tanekhet’s.
Therkon turned from the counter, out toward the fringe of masts and gunwales and mooring ropes, the hustle of seamen, officers, agents, stevedores, the racket of wheels and orders and voices in every accent along the River’s length. He was saying something, but he seemed to be speaking underwater. I could hardly hear.
He heaved my pack off the floor. Slid his free hand under my elbow. The touch burnt like fire, but I could not let it show. We paced over the functional tiling to the outer door.
Dhanissa lay four berths along. She still had traffic up the gangplank, but the hatches were drawn, and they were taking ties off the sails.
Someone came down to us: I dimly heard Therkon explaining, doubtless the story of a female relative, cousin or sister, traveling upRiver. The pack changed hands, the person vanished. Therkon turned to me.
Our eyes met. A vast weight suffocated my whole chest. And if it had not, what was there to say?
He looked down at me, the presence so dear, familiar, learnt from so many days’ journey, so many trials and perils, so many ports of strife or sanctuary. The silky hair, the bronze-dark eyes, the flamboyant bones, the features were all the same. Except they seemed to have hardened, shrinking inward. So what looked down at me, severe, graven, beautiful and empty-faced, was not my friend and lover and way companion. It was the hatchet man.
Nouip had Seen right. It was the core of his nature. To see, and to do what must be done.
Except he had to clear his throat, twice, before he spoke.
“Chaeris.”
I let my eyes answer, Therkon. The other words, clythx, caissyl, beloved, life’s core, I spoke in my heart alone.
“I—”
He stopped. Took a tiny breath.
Then he said, sounding just a little breathless, “I wish you good journey. A safe coming. A welcome home.”
I managed to nod. I did not speak. I did not dare. Nor did he dare any formal gesture of farewell. Only the look that broke the mask in those eyes for a fleeting moment, as he lifted his hand to me, once.
Then he turned, and I watched him walk away.
Chapter XIX
It was fortunate, I know now, that Skthoja and Seony gave us such a fast passage as far as Prospect, because however slow the rest proved, we were still ahead of anything but speculation when we reached Riversend. Perhaps it was more than fortune, though neither Two nor the Sight can tell me, that brought me to go on so soon. And that Dhanissa was there, and ready too.
So whatever public hubbub burst upon my heels, for all that long blur when I must have eaten, slept, worked out, however sketchily, in the roomy passenger cabin, to everyone else I was just one more anonymous woman in Iskardan cloak and leggings, with a bearing that hinted troublecrew. A no-one, with only the past to haunt me, till the journey’s end.
When Dhanissa moored after that three weeks’ hiatus, and still feeling half a sleepwalker, I came down the gangplank into the familiar, utterly different waterfront of Marbleport. And the first person I saw was Tanekhet.
He would come down on occasion, to meet his ships. Either by turn in his consort, or of his own choice. Or for some particular reason, but my flinch at that thought died unborn at the look on his face.
“Chaeris!”
With such a heart-stabbing Dhasdeini accent that every scar ripped away together and I fell headlong in his arms and wept.
When I came to he was rubbing my back: gently, expertly, a slow light circle below my shoulderblades, the touch of a man long accustomed to lovers, to women, to assuaging grief. In a way he had never dared touch me before.
I lifted my head and tried to sniffle. The shoulder of his coat was soaked. I had almost had to lean down to it, though we had been of a height when I left. I made to rub my streaming nose with a wrist and he put a handkerchief in the fingers. And went on holding me, lightly, one arm about my waist, while I tried to re-assemble myself.
At some time he must have made arrangements, offered makeshift explanations. Got us indoors. It was an office, small and cramped with an overloaded desk. Dust motes turned in sunlight through a dirty window, though the room itself was clean. Outside voices spoke and hooves and wheels clattered. On the River, waterbirds called. Not gulls, at least. Inside, it was quite still. And empty, apart from us.
Then Tanekhet tightened his arm a fraction and said, “Therkon?” on a note of such compassion, such understanding, that I broke down all over again.
Someone came in. The fluctuation of light and air, the door’s click half-spun me round, but the newcomer already had both arms tight round the pair of us, a smell familiar long before Therkon’s. Identified before she said, “Chaeris.”
Tez.
I cried a little longer, in the common sanctuary of their arms. About the time I was ready to lift my head and wipe my nose yet again, Tez said, “We had the letter. From Hranhaven.”
Tez to her backbone: not exclamations or sympathies or pity, but information. Telling me how much they knew. What I could now omit.
When I only nodded, she said very softly, “Verrith? Azo?”
I could not speak, but I turned my left arm to show the wrist-knife, and felt her grasp go slack as she understood.
Then she re-braced herself. And asked, too calmly, “Therkon?”
I was too grateful for the chance to bury my face again. So I only had to listen to his over-cool response at what must have been a dagger stare.
“He was with her after the wreck. If he had not come back now, neither would Chaeris.”
It’s true, I thought, but how did you know? While I sniffled and tried to find words, Tanekhet lightly, tenderly, brushed my hair.
“She is wearing Verrith’s knives. When you came in, she moved like troublecrew. And if she has been troublecrew, it could only be for Therkon.”
And Iskardan, Amberlight troublecrew might die in place of their charges, but come back without them, never. Not alive.
I could feel Tez’s stare myself. A heated dagger point, in the small of my back.
Presently, just above a whisper, she said, in Tez’s steel-cool disaster voice, “Did you fail?”
“No! Then neither of us would have come back!”
I had been too passionate. I felt her tension sharpen, but still she put the great matters first.
“You found what it was? You could, still, do something?”
“We fixed it. Him. Sthassamaer.” I had put that name in the letter, a priority. If we had not come back, Iskarda and Dhasdein would need whatever information they could get. “Skalr—in the Isles, they made a tale. Two can tell you,” I let the inflection add, Not now. Suddenly I was exhausted beyond a mere weeping bout. It was over. All over. The details could wait.
Tez’s arm loosed in relief. And then drew carefully tight. As carefully she said, “Then what has made you weep, Chaeris?”
When I did not answer, minutely, her voice hardened. “And why are you here alone?”
“I came upRiver. It was nothing, I stayed in the cabin mostly, they knew I was Iskardan, there was never trouble—”
“Why alone?”
“Therkon,” Tanekhet said.
In quite another tone this time, so soft and lethal I grabbed him as if he intended murder on the spot.
“He didn’t do it, I did! The fuss, the uproar, the, the celebrations, and, and—we were in Riversend, I couldn’t face it. I said, I have to go. He helped me find a ship . . .”