He grinned at her and returned the pressure gently. “For an outlander, I’m doing fantastic,” he said. He shifted his arm around her shoulders to look at the tattoo on his wrist.
Alde noticed the movement and looked, too, “What’s that for?” she asked.
He chuckled. “Just thinking. A girl I knew used to tease me about my tattoo. That’s my name on the banner there across the torch. She used to say I got it so I could remember who I was, if I ever forgot.”
“And do you need to be reminded?”
He looked out for a moment into the bitter stillness of the alien night, then up to the great, burning stars. His ears caught the distant howling of wolves. All the scents of the looming mountains came to him, shrub and pine, rock and water. The long hilt of the killing sword lying close by his right hand reflected the dim sheen of firelight, as did the braided hair of the woman curled, warm and fragile as a captive bird, in the circle of his other arm. He remembered, as if in an old legend, a sunburned California youth in a garish pachuco jacket, painting vans in a body shop. About the only thing they had in common, he reflected, was the tattoo.
“Yeah,” he said softly. “Yeah, sometimes I do.”
“I know what you feel,” she murmured. “Sometimes I think I need reminding myself.”
“What was it like,” he asked, “to be Queen?”
She was so long silent that he was afraid he had hurt her by asking. But looking over at her face, profiled against the dim rose-amber of the fire, he saw in her eyes instead a kind of dreamy nostalgia, of memories whose beauty overrode their pain.
“It was very beautiful,” she said at last. “I remember—dancing, and the hall all lit with candles, the way the flames would all ripple in unison with the movement of the ladies’ dresses. The smell of the warm nights, lemonflowers and spice perfumes, coming up-river on the royal barge and the water stairs of the Palace all lit like a jewelbox, golden in the darkness. Having my own household, my own gardens, the freedom to do what I wanted.” She rested her head against his shoulder, the looped braids that bound her hair as smooth as satin under his jaw and gleaming like ebony. “Maybe it would have been the same, no matter whom I married,” she went on softly. “Maybe it wasn’t so much being Queen as having my own place to be.” Her voice was wistful. “I’m really a very happy person, you know. All I want is to take life as it comes, to be at peace, with small things, small joys. I’m not really a stubborn, bloodthirsty hellion … “
“Oh, yes, you are,” he teased her, holding her close. She raised her eyes to his reproachfully. “And I love you anyway. Maybe I love you because of it. I don’t know. Sometimes I don’t think there is any why in love. I just do.”
Her arms tightened convulsively around his ribs, and she turned her face away, burying it in his shoulder. After a moment he realized that she was crying.
“Hey … ” He turned under the weight of the cloak and stroked her shivering shoulders tenderly. “Hey, you can’t cry on guard duty.” The cloak slithered down as he raised his hands and caressed her bowed head with its gleaming, twisted braids. “Hey, what is it, Alde?”
“It’s nothing,” she whispered, and began wiping futilely at her eyes with the back of her hand. “It’s just that nobody ever said that to me before. I’m sorry, I won’t be stupid like this again.” She fumbled at the fallen cloak, her face averted and wet with tears.
Rudy caught her firmly under the chin, forced her head up, and kissed her gently on the mouth. Her lips tasted of salt. “I can’t believe that,” he murmured.
She sniffled and swiped at her eyes with her arm in a child’s gesture. “It’s true.”
Rudy’s voice was soft. “What about Eldor?”
At that her eyes filled again, the tears making them seem fever-brilliant in the soft, glowing light of the watch fire. For a moment she could only gaze helplessly at him, unable to speak.
“I’m sorry,” Rudy said. So much had happened, he had forgotten how short a time it had been.
She sighed and relaxed in his hold, as if something had gone out of her, a tension whose very pain had kept her strong. “No,” she said softly. “No, it’s all right. I loved Eldor. I loved him from the time I was a little girl. He had a magic that drew people, a vitality, a splendor. You noticed even the simplest things he did, as if they had a kind of significance that no one else could match. He became King when I was ten.” She bowed her head, as if under the weight of memories impossible either to accept or to withstand. Wordlessly, Rudy took her back into the circle of his arm and drew the cloak up over her shoulders to cut out the icy air of the night. In those black cliffs above the road, the wolves were howling again, the full-throated chorus of the pack at the kill, distant and faint in the darkness.
“I remember standing on the balcony of our townhouse in Gae, the day he rode to his coronation.” The murmur of her voice was hardly louder than the soughing of the pines above the road and the crackle of the fire. She was a dreamer reliving a dream. “He’d been in exile—he was always in and out of favor with his father. It was a hot day in full summer, and the cheering in the streets was so loud you could barely hear the music of the procession. He was like a god, like a shining knight out of a legend, a royal prince of flame and darkness. Later he came to our house to go hunting with Alwir or to see him on some matters of the Realm, and I was so afraid of him I could barely speak. I think I would have died for him, if he had asked.”
Rudy saw her, a shy, skinny little girl, all dark-blue eyes and black pigtails, in the crimson gown of a daughter of the House of Bes, hiding behind the curtains in the hall to watch her tall, suave brother and that dark, brilliant King walk by. He was barely aware that he spoke aloud. “So you always loved him.”
That same small smile of self-mockery folded into the corner of her mouth. “Oh, I was always falling in and out of love in those days. For six months I had a terrible crush on Janus of Weg. But this was—different. Yes, I always loved him. But when Alwir finally arranged the marriage, I found out that—that loving someone desperately doesn’t always mean that he’ll love you back.”
And Rudy said again, “I’m sorry.” He meant it, though he saw now that the dead King’s ghost would always be his rival. She had loved so much, it was monstrous that she should be hurt by not having that love returned.
Silently the pressure of her hand in his thanked him, “He was so—distant,” she said after a time, when she had regained control of her voice. “So cold. After we were married, I seldom saw him—not because he hated me, I think, but because—for weeks at a time I don’t think he even remembered he was married. Looking back, I suppose I should have seen that that brilliance of his was so impersonal, but—it was too late, anyway.” She shrugged, the gesture belied by the quaver in her voice, and she wiped her eyes again. “And the worst of it is that I still love him.”
To that there was no possible reply. There was only physical tenderness, the closeness of another human being, and the reassurance that he was there and would not leave her. Against him, he felt her struggle to control her sobs and eventually grow still, forcing living grief back into its proper sphere of memory. He asked, “So Alwir arranged your marriage, too?”
“Oh, yes,” she replied, in a small but perfectly steady voice. “Alwir knew I loved him, but I don’t think that was the reason. He wanted the House of Bes allied to the Royal House; he wanted his nephew to be High King. I don’t think he’d have forced me into it if there had been someone else, but since there wasn’t—Alwir is like that; he’s very calculating. He knew he would be made Chancellor after we were married. He’s always doing things with two intentions.”