If Corinn noticed the vague caveat he intended she gave no sign of it.
“Rialus,” she said, “I very dearly need a friend-a powerful friend. That’s why I’m speaking to you now. Do you, Rialus, also want a friend?”
He answered before he had time to censor himself. “Yes, very much.”
“Then I will be your friend. We will give each other things, as friends do. First, tell me of my brother. Hanish tries to keep me ignorant, but he’s just cruel. It does you no damage to tell me things everybody else knows already. Just help me understand what’s happening in the world.”
He could do that, he thought. She needed him. She had said so herself. What would it hurt to tell her things that everybody else knew anyway? He was not ready to accept her empathy, but he could do this.
He spent the next half hour filling her in on everything he knew. He found his voice surprisingly nimble as he detailed Aliver’s movements, his troop strength and makeup. He told of the myths swirling around him, rumors of sorcery and such. Little of this impressed Hanish, however. The chieftain was annoyed by the timing of Aliver’s return. He would have much preferred to see the Tunishnevre’s move completed. Hanish had drawn in all the troops he could from the provinces and concentrated them around Bocoum. The Numrek had not joined them yet, but they were ready to march and planned to do so the moment he returned. The war, he said, was only days away from beginning.
He was surprised by the manner in which Corinn questioned him. Again and again she asked for details, specifics, and explanations. He gave them as best he could. When she asked him what posed the greatest threat to Aliver’s army, Rialus answered, “Why, the Numrek, of course. The very ones to whom I’m ambassador.”
“Yes, the undefeatable Numrek…Are they truly so fierce?”
Rialus spent a few moments singing their praises as regards martial matters. He was aware of the irony of this-considering how much he hated them-but the more Corinn asked of him, the more he was compelled to offer.
“If the entire world turned against them, of course they’d be defeated,” he concluded, “but not without doing a great deal of damage. I’m sure Hanish Mein considered moving against them. But that was before. Now he’s quite happy to call them allies again.”
“So he needs them?”
“Very much so. Hanish may have tricks up his sleeve, but he most definitely needs and relies upon my wards.”
Corinn’s face went troubled, hesitant, and unsure. She seemed to forget Rialus for a moment. She placed a hand upon the windowsill in a way that highlighted the curve of her breast. Reaching out seemed almost a measure to keep her from fainting. Her eyes stared through the window in a way that suggested she was thinking hard enough that she was not actually seeing. She chewed the corner of her lower lip.
“Rialus, what do you want most in the world?” She turned toward him. The resolve on her face and in her voice indicated that she had settled whatever had been bothering her and was ready to move forward. “I think I know. You want to be respected. You want to be rewarded. You want Hanish to acknowledge that you helped him and Maeander triumph against my father. You want the sort of spoils men like Larken received. You want to never have to wake without a beauty beside you, one who’ll do exactly your bidding. These are some of the things you want. Why wouldn’t you? Why wouldn’t any ambitious man crave such things? I’m right, aren’t I?”
Rialus opened his mouth, but Corinn did not wait for his answer.
“Hanish will never give you any of those things. He laughs at you. He thinks you’re a fool, a coward, an idiot. He once joked that if he didn’t make you ambassador to the Numrek-a job he considers most foul-he’d have made you a court comedian. You wouldn’t even have to practice your act, he said. You’d only have to be yourself. That’s what he thinks of you.”
“I-”
“You know I’m telling you the truth. You’ve always known it, and you hate Hanish for it, don’t you?”
“Ha-ha-hate is not the word I’d use,” Rialus said. “Princess, I was under the-the impression that you quite loved Hanish. That you-”
Corinn threw back her head and laughed. She opened her mouth so widely he saw straight to the back of her throat. Most disconcerting.
“You are a funny man,” she said, once she had gotten control of herself again. “I don’t love Hanish. Do you?”
Rialus was relieved that she did not pause for him to answer that question.
“Of course you don’t. You’re like me.” She pressed the wedge of her hand between her breasts, somehow a belligerent, not sensuous, gesture. “You and I are done with love. I’ll never give this heart to a man again. Not even to you, Rialus, charmer though you are. You may think whatever thoughts of me you like. I cannot get them out of your head and I don’t care what you fantasize. But you’ll never have my love; nor do you want it, do you? You’d like the shell of me, but not what’s inside. Anyway, there will be others for you, many others. Others more beautiful and vacuous than I. Understand?”
He nodded. He did understand. She was not, as she pointed out, the empty beauty that he had imagined her to be. There was much behind her face that he’d not been aware of before. She was, he realized, something he’d never considered her to be. Dangerous. That’s what she was. He did not know exactly how, could not imagine what power she wielded, and yet he now believed she was not a woman to be crossed.
As if answering this thought, Corinn said, “Hanish betrayed me in ways that I can never forgive. In ways I won’t forget. Not this time. Rialus, I hope you’ll be truer than he. I have a message for you to take to Calrach. I have an offer to make him. I’ve looked into getting off the island myself, but I can see no way to do it. I’m a prisoner here, Rialus. But with your help…If we succeed in pulling off what I have in mind, you’ll be a very lucky man. You’ll be rewarded after the war with everything you’ve ever felt you deserved. I, and my brother, will make sure you have it.”
CHAPTER
Thaddeus Clegg could not have been happier with the man Aliver Akaran had become. Perhaps nobody but the former chancellor recognized how much the prince resembled his father in his features and timbre of voice, in the intensity and intelligence of his brown eyes, and the upright carriage of his torso. He was very much like Leodan had been in his youth. But Aliver had taken all these traits and honed them to a greater level of sharpness. Leodan had dreamed of and cogitated on action, reform, justice, but never truly acted; Aliver now lived and breathed all of these things and strove to shape the world accordingly. Thaddeus had been concerned over Aliver’s initial reticence to fully take up his mantle of responsibility, but that seemed ancient history now. Since returning from his search for the Santoth, the prince had not faltered. When he asked to again wear the King’s Trust, Sangae did not hesitate to retrieve it for him. With it hanging from his side Aliver Akaran looked every bit a hero in the making.
Aliver’s first task-that of winning the Halaly to his cause-had not been an easy one. He refused to join them in a petty war to exterminate their neighbors. Instead, he convinced them to put provincial squabbles behind them. They shared a common enemy far worse than any threat one Talayan tribe posed another. Defeating Hanish Mein, he argued, would be the single greatest thing any of them could do to change their fortunes. He promised that when he was king he would remember every deed done for him and every deed done against him. He would reward them all in manifold ways. The Halaly, he had said, could be leaders among Talayans, or they could be the sole people left without a say in the coming world. They’d be laughed at by future generations who would look back with ridicule on a people so blind to the changes at hand, who had been rendered inconsequential because of it. It could not have been easy to look Oubadal in the face and say such things, but Aliver managed it.