“Ah,” said Fengthira, doubtless in mindspeech. “Whate’er the Morheage lacked, they ne’er had craven hearts.”
A moment later, I heard feet.
Beryx paused between the rivannons. Their eyes flew together. I could feel the lightning snap. Then her lips lifted back. If she had lost the power, she retained the hate.
“I knew,” she said, “you’d be here for this.”
Beryx was looking stern. Mostly from nervousness, I suspect.
“Not going to produce any catchcries? ‘I told you so’? ‘Incompetence’? ‘It serves you right’? How ‘good’ this is for Math?”
When he shook his head the grimace became a snarl.
“So kind.” It came like a poisoned dart. “But then, you always were. No matter what I did—you’d never hit back.”
His silence made her eyes flare like golden hail. “And now I shall repay it a hundredfold. But you won’t have the last laugh. Oh no! You can have my splendid ‘empire,’ my loyal ‘subjects’—or what’s left of them, ha-ha! And plenty of patching up, won’t you love that! But you won’t get me to drag round the streets on a rope! And”—her voice went shrill—“you won’t get this!”
She jerked the Well. Its surface shot a red sheet of deflected light.
“And, my fine virtuous friend, do you know why? Because we’re both going down there!” She jerked her elbow to the inferno and her voice shot up in a shrilling laugh. “Let’s see what you do about that!”
She glared at him, breathing in quick short pants. Like her eyes, I guessed her pupils would be dilated, but they were lost in that single night.
He waited till her laughter was quite finished. Then he said, with no inflection at all, “I don’t want Assharral.”
“To be sure!” A shriek of truly witch-like mirth. “Is it too much damaged? But I thought that would appeal to you!”
He waited again. His eyes were steady now, the nervousness gone.
When she had calmed, he answered, “I never wanted Assharral. That’s something you know you knew.”
“No, Assharral would have been gift-toll, wouldn’t it? What you really wanted was this.”
She spun round, my faraway heart stopped. Over her shoulder she taunted him, the Well poised above the abyss.
“What will you bid for it this time? Don’t tell me you don’t want it, that’s a lie. No offer? Oh, so sad. It’s going first. I want to watch your face when your precious Fount of Wisdom, your wizardly pride and joy, your chance to change the universe goes flying down there, phut! If that’s the last thing I see, it’ll be worth the price. And it will be the last. How very, very sweet!”
She shook the Well. Beryx’s face was empty. He did not so much as twitch. When she paused, he said, “Throw it, then.”
She was the one off-balanced, this time. Her mouth half-opened. Then she turned to face him, the Well clenched to her breast.
“Don’t try to cozen me! I know what it is. You told me. I didn’t think even you could be such a fool as that. There’ll be no more Wreve-lethar when this is gone. No more supreme art, no more making Math. Not one of your warlocks that ever lived wouldn’t weep blood at the thought of losing it. And you’re no different!”
“No.” He sounded quite casual. “I know what it is, and what a tragedy it would be to lose it. I’d sooner you destroyed all Assharral, yes. But”—and for the first time a gleam of humor showed—“that’s not what I want.”
She stopped laughing and stared at him, her eyes narrowed as if to see over a great distance, blazing black slits. He did not look away. And suddenly I knew with fear and outrage and sheer exasperation that she was reading his thoughts as well. And he was permitting it.
“Bah!” she cried. “It’s a lie!”
“It’s not.”
“Don’t try to hoodwink me!”
“I’m not.”
I saw her breath stop. Then her head reared back and up and if she had blazed before she fairly erupted now.
“So even the Well and even Assharral wasn’t enough! Not for you, you upstart little—king! And if there was no other way you’d have crawled there up my skirts!”
I heard Fengthira choke. I saw Beryx’s chest rise and hold, and knew he was struggling with all his might: not to curb anger, but to contain a laugh.
“No,” he answered, straight-faced. “At a pinch—I could have foregone the skirts.”
She very nearly threw the Well at him. Her forearms jerked, it flared red light. She hissed between her teeth.
“Get out! Slimy, cackling, hypocritical whoremonger, get out!”
He sobered. Quite gently, but inflexibly, he answered, “When I get what I want.”
As her head reared again he went on softly, unhurried, unstressed.
“I don’t want the Well, I don’t want Assharral. I don’t want to mend your wretched country or turn you into an aedr, or even try to save you, for your own sake, from Ammath. I want something else.”
Her hands trembled on the Well. A chaos of reactions battled in those enormous eyes. Outrage won.
“So you think now I’m beaten you can stroll in and snap your fingers and say, ‘Here, dog,’ and I’ll come crawling all over your feet? Because it’s my only hope?” Her teeth bared. “I’ll see you blinded first!”
He clicked his tongue. “You should know better. You do know better. If I were so boorish as to snap my fingers, the last thing I’d want is you crawling over my feet.”
Her cheeks flamed red as the spasming fire. “Thank you!” She could barely hiss. “Then just what do you want?”
He smiled then, outright. A sweet smile, full of mischief, with something hotter underneath. “A token of your thanks?”
“OH!” It was too much. She did throw the Well, but she did it without malice to mind her of the lava, she hurled it in sheer ungovernable outrage straight at his head. And it missed.
There was a crash, a spray of vivid white sparks. The Well rebounded, leaving, I saw in total disbelief, a dent in the black native rock. Struck the pavement, left another dent, and rolled slowly, lazily, to his feet.
He did not look down. He watched her with the tag-end of that smile, while she teetered on the parapet, quite literally gnashing her teeth.
“You ape! You bear! You dancing bear! So now you have it, don’t you? All of it!” Tears of pure chagrin spilt on her cheeks. “But I’ll tell you once and for all, you won’t get me!”
She went up on her toes to spin and leap and he took one swift step and shouted, “Stop!”
It physically wrenched her head around. I wanted to hide from her eyes. They were actually scorching me.
“Moriana,” he said. Quietly. And more quietly, “Don’t. Please.”
Her teeth bared. “Why not?”
“Because,” he answered softly, “I ask.”
The lava steamed, the earth roared. A dead branch rattled on the perridel. Then, fraction by fraction, she turned her back on the abyss. Now the glitter in her eyes was ice.
“Why,” she said, “not?”
“Because I love you,” he said.
She was so stunned she almost whispered.
“What?”
“Because I love you.” It came now without plea or passion or stress. “I don’t care if you chained me or gave me fever or burnt my hand or drowned two hundred phalanxmen or murdered innocent people or tore your country apart to blackmail me. I don’t care if you’re queening it up here or running like a pi-dog with every Assharran out for your blood and nothing to your name, not even skirts. I love you. You’re what I want.”
Her eyes dilated, flared and narrowed, a sequence of passions flew across her face. Shock, hate, fury, triumph, a torment of conflicting spites. If he had the Well she had, now, the ultimate weapon. To wound beyond remedy this foe who had just delivered himself into her hands.
The tumult passed. A vicious glee succeeded it.
“That will make me truly happy,” every word a stab, “when I go.”
He gave her the pleasure of pleading. “Moriana, please—”
She laughed in his face. “Just what is left for me? Deposed, thrown out—lynched! Or crawling round some hovel, turning to a hag, in debt to your—mercy—for what’s left of my life!”
“Moriana—”
“I’d sooner die and be done!”
She whipped about and he shouted, “No!”
It was panic. More than panic. I felt it as she must, she whirled back, teeth bared, fists clenched in her skirts till the black ripped under her fingernails.
“You hypocrite! Preach about love and use your filthy arts on me? To be sure, you’ll ask!”
The laughter had gone. Under the dirt and travel-dust he was completely white. He lifted his hand, one gesture that tried to say it all: I would never enforce it, I never meant it to happen. I would never compel anyone like that. Least of all you.
Her eyes burned like the lava behind her, her head came forward as if to spit. I wanted to cover my own eyes. To cry, No, don’t let me see.
His face said it all. Final destruction, defeat. Loss of the one thing that might have balanced the wreckage. His own dreams. His wildest hopes.
But he stood there and watched her, and then he made the slightest shift of his good hand. So brief, so simple, a child could read it, yet an aedr’s gesture: If it was a command, I revoke it. You are free. If you choose it, go.
She understood that. Her lips drew back in that vampire smile. The lava pulsed below her, a red flare in the smoke, she tossed her head up in response. “Changed your mind?”
Just audibly, he said, “No.”
“Had wiser thoughts?”
For a moment his face took me back to the clammy dark of the vault. Then he turned his hand out in that little, assenting motion and I knew that once again he was committing everything to a gamble. To the chance that she would remember his own beliefs and tenets. What he had said about Math.
“The choice,” he said, so quietly, “is yours.”
The choice of death or life, and more. The surety that, whatever he felt for her, he would not interfere. Not even for this.
She froze on the parapet, poised like a fallen leaf. For an instant I knew that, to her bones’ marrow, she had understood.
Then those black depths slitted. The gold meteors stilled.
“So. . . .”
It was barely breathed.
He must have stopped breathing too. I wondered the lava itself did not stop.
“If I. . . .” The hand-wave finished it: did not go down there. “If. . . .”
Go on, his eyes said. Torture me if you choose.
“If I stayed. . . .”
It must have been easier to fight the Well than to let her finish. To stand, the length of that hesitation, and simply wait.
“If I stayed . . . you’d . . . protect me?”
In the flesh I would have shut my eyes. Would have yelled, Don’t believe her!—Listen to me! It’s not wariness, it’s calculation, nothing else!
But he had already replied. Clenching his fist, his shoulders, to keep the words steady. Pledging himself with his eternal lunacy that would deny truth and caution and common sense for the sake of impossible hope.
“Yes.”
“You’d stop my—loving subjects’—revenge?”
No, I could not bawl! Not even for Math! I did shut my eyes, or at least the faculty of sight. Through whatever passed for ears the word came. Steadier than before.
“Yes.”
I looked again. She was staring, those black gulfs of eyes starred with golden darts. The mouth was set, no softening there. The face of a gambler. A predator.
“You’d save me from my—just deserts?”
He answered as evenly, a little faster.
“Yes.”
“Save my life?”
It went up a little at the end. Perhaps even she could not master that disbelief.
Like his eyes, his voice never faltered.
“Yes.”
Her hand turned in the sendal’s black. She drew a visible breath.
“You’d—marry me?”
Perhaps she had expected him to balk there. He answered as if she had asked him how the weather looked.
“Yes.”
Smoke whirled in a breath of wind, the dead leaves hissed. I felt my own lungs choke on the brimstone fumes, could feel the sweat trickling on her temples, her jaw, into the pure white curve between her breasts. I could not read her face at all. Not triumph now, not fury, not mockery either. But the blackness of her eyes had hardened. The shift was in her voice.
“After I’ve whored with ‘ten lives’ favorites’?”
He answered as if nothing had changed.
“Yes.”
“If I lost Assharral? If I was a beggar, a pauper?”
“Yes.”
“If I was old and ugly and—and sick to death?”
“Yes.”
“And you’d forgive everything I’ve done to you?”
“Yes.”
“All my—Ammath?”
“Yes.”
“Not because it’s right? To ‘forgive me’?” Now the sneer was molten. “Because you have to do it or betray your ‘Math’?”
“No.”
“And if it came to a choice between me and Math, you’d put me first?”
His face moved. Clear, open anguish. But even then his voice kept control.
“I would hope it never . . . came to that.”
“But if it did?”
He did shut his eyes. It came in the barest whisper.
“If I had to . . . if it was the only . . . yes.”
The air, the Morhyrne trembled under me. Burn you in the everlasting pits, I swore at her. Do you know what you’ve just heard?
Something she must have felt. I actually saw her own lips tremble, so quickly he could not have seen before he re-opened his eyes. But the look that met him was harder than obsidian. As black, as pitiless.
“Because you’re ‘in love’ with me? You couldn’t live without me? I mean more to you than anything else?”
She made it flaying satire. His answer turned it back to honest truth.
“Yes.”
The meteors blazed then, flaming into white-hot scorn. “You love me so much you’d pervert justice for me, deny your ‘beliefs’—such as they are!—for me, betray your friends for me, you’d marry me on those terms—and afterwards I could tread all over you and you’d go on suffering and forgiving and refusing to hit back and doing all those bloody-minded forbearing lily-livered things, and bleat that you had to do it for the sake of”—she fairly bawled it—“ ‘Math’!”
His shoulders sprang upright. His eyes shot one green streak of mirth.
“Oh, no,” he said with the utmost affability. “If I ever do lay hands on you, madam, I shan’t suffer anything. I shall tie you to the bedpost and beat you black and blue. Every . . . single . . . night.”
She all but fell off the parapet. Her hand clapped to her heart. The color fluxed wildly in her cheeks. Her eyes were enormous, there was some strange convulsion in their depths. She hiccupped for breath.
The spasm passed. For a moment she was wholly, perfectly still.
Then her lips shook, her eyes went impossibly wider, the gold flamed and crescendoed and died. And the obsidian melted. Blackness shivered and shifted, transformed to sheets of coal-black mist.
“Oh,” she whispered. She was laughing, crying, both together, unable to help herself. “Oh, you are such a fool!”
The sun came out in his face. Looking back at her he laughed in pure delight.
“An outright imbecile! An absolute idiot!”
“I am, I am! Else I couldn’t have made such an almighty bungle out of this.”
“B-bungle?” She was crying, and trying to blink rather than wipe away the tears.
“What else could you call it? When I tried to propose I ended making fun of you, and you threw me in chains. When you came down to bait
me I had to preach at your courtiers and you all but broke my head. And when your Wardrobe Mistress blazoned your very private affairs all over Zyphryr Coryan I didn’t even have the sense to shut her up.”
“Klyra! That . . . ! How would you have felt if someone—”
“Believe me, I knew just how you felt! Who made a laughing stock of my very private feelings to the whole confounded court?”
Her lips twitched. She tried to stop a sound and choked. Then, for the first time, I heard the Lady Moriana laugh without menace or malice or spite.
Their mirth died away together. She looked at him, he looked at her.
“And what,” she demanded with feigned belligerence, “am I supposed to do now?”
He was still smiling. I had never seen such joy, such tenderness, such candid happiness in his face.
“You could,” he suggested softly, “come down—if you liked.”
She looked at the pavement. He came over, holding out his hand. For another long moment she held back. Then hers came to meet it, and he helped her down into the bower.
She stood looking up at him, uncertain, and trying to mask it in truculence. A new light, not of laughter, woke in his eyes.
“I shouldn’t,” he said rather thickly, “do this. But—”
He still had hold of her hand. He gave it such a jerk she literally tumbled into him, caught her with his right elbow while he transferred his left hand from wrist to waist, said, “Blast you, look up here,” and began kissing her in a way that had absolutely nothing to do with Math.
Chapter XIII
I was back in my body, looking across a battered vestibule into Fengthira’s face. “Ah,” she said in pure satisfaction. “At last.”
Then she saw me and that smile came, fey and chilling even in mirth.
“What, didst think he’d kiss her forehead and ‘forgive her’—send her off to do better like one of tha mewling priests? Tcha! May be soft, but he’s flesh and blood.”
“But—but—”
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