Her head popped up. “Villain madman!” A sharp blow stung my cheek…and waked me from my fog of lust to shuffling bodies and laughter all around our ungainly heap. “Get your hands off—”
I pulled her head downward, crushing her lips against mine. Her hands scratched and gouged my arms and pulled my hair as she tried to wrestle away. Scrabbling, wriggling, she drew her knee up sharply, and I shifted to preclude disaster, praying her cloak would not fall aside and display my glowing feet.
“No angel here, young Filp,” said the gravel-voiced man. “’Tis only ones searching for a bit of heaven fallen in the midst of hell.”
“Could ye not give a man a quat to ’imself?” I shouted, squeezing Saverian’s face to my shoulder before she bit my lips off. “Yea, laugh as ye will…get ye all to Magrog’s furnace and take all pinchy wives with ye!”
The men shoved the pale-haired child behind the women. Ribald comments all around and they decided the fun was over. Murmurs and laughter faded into the evening noises of the lane.
“I’m sorry,” I said, still muzzling the squirming physician. Torn between annoyance that she had intruded her peculiar self into an already precarious activity and a fear that I’d committed an unpardonable sin and forfeited her skillful and sensible aid, I couldn’t stop talking. “My head just went off…well, not my head exactly…but it’s been a long, weary autumn…yet I meant no ill to you. I would never—Well, I don’t think I would. I do appreciate your hiding me—damnably awkward to light up like this when I can’t afford attention. Though one might say you invited this problem by coming along where you were not expected—though certainly you did not invite my inappropriate reaction—but I’ve no idea what we’re going to do with you or how we’re going to keep you safe when you cannot possibly go with us. What the devil were you thinking?” Hoping she had enough fodder for conversation beyond withering my manhood, I released her.
She climbed to her feet without the least care where her elbows, knees, and fists found purchase. Were her discomfiture a bit more intense, her complexion might have lit sigils of its own in purest scarlet.
“I thought that the people who were most likely to need my care happened to be in Palinur—three men with somewhat specialized needs that no hedgerow leech or back-alley surgeon is capable of tending. I thought that you and I had come to some kind of mutual respect, untainted, for the most part, by the brutish instincts of those who prefer action to reason.”
“Well, of course, we—”
“As for my safety, you are most certainly not responsible for me. Nor is anyone but myself. After a discussion with Brother Victor, I decided that I might better be close by as you attempt this rescue, and that as long as I was here, I could bring news of these ventures to your sister, the Sinduria, who seems to care what becomes of you, though she’s not yet been informed that she is not your sister. And I brought these.” She pulled a vial and a scrap of stained canvas from her pocket and shoved them into my hand. “Elene told me that touching blood enabled you to track a person more easily—a detail that you failed to mention to me. While you and Mistress Moonhead exchanged your overwrought farewells, I was retrieving a sample of Prince Osriel’s blood, which I keep on hand to formulate his medicines. I also managed to acquire this scrap cut from one of Thane Stearc’s old jupons, though I don’t know that dried blood has the same useful properties for pureblood magic.”
“Blood…gods, yes. It makes tracking much easier. I just never imagined anyone would have any.” Thickheaded and embarrassed, I brushed twigs and ice crystals from my skin. “And, yes, Thalassa should be told. All right…yes, that would be kind of you…”
Happily for me, Voushanti joined us before I could get too tangled up in words or recollections of the sensation of Saverian’s breath on my skin. The sun was sinking. I turned my back to her and donned my finery as quickly as I could. Nothing like the luxurious restriction of buttons and laces for taming lustful mania. Gods, Saverian…of all women in the world…
So do as she says, fool. Attempt to reason, instead of acting blindly. I fastened my cloak with the ivory-and-gold wolf brooch.
“You can’t traipse alone through Palinur, mistress physician,” I said, tugging the mask from my pocket. “No matter how easily you can ensorcel those who aim to harm you, it’s too dangerous. I wouldn’t let any friend of mine do so. I’ll come up with some explanation for Max, so Voushanti can deliver you to Thalassa.”
Voushanti, his own attire impeccable despite his sojourn in the shrubbery, glared at me as if I were a particularly stupid infant. “To change your arrangements this late risks the entire plan, such as it is. And I must follow you to the Harrower priestess, so we’ll know where you and the prince are held. I’ve no time to coddle foolish women.”
“I’m not an idiot,” said Saverian, her dignity regained though her skin retained a rosy hue. “I’ll wait here until Magnus is delivered and transferred. Once you know his location, Mardane, you can return here for me. I would welcome your escort on my brief visit to the Mother’s temple.”
“Leaving the scene will jeopardize the prince’s rescue,” snapped Voushanti. “You have blood-bound me to this man, but I cannot read his thoughts. With no means of contact between us, I must be available at whatever time he chooses.”
“No means of contact?” Saverian raised her eyebrows, quite smug. “You gentlemen really should have said something earlier. I can, of course, work a small enchantment…”
Stupid not to think of it. My sister Thalassa had once worked a word trigger with her favorite insults, so that anywhere within ten quellae, I could hear her address me as fiend heart or iron skull did she but feed magic to the words.
Voushanti and I left the beech grove tight bound with the names of dead man and bluejay and a few specific signals for special circumstances. If he didn’t hear from me in three days, he would force his way inside Fortress Torvo. As we picked our way through the crowded lane to our meeting with Max, my hearing picked Saverian’s laughter out of the noise. I smiled as I remembered the warmth of her breath and the feel of her firm flesh and slender bones crushed against my skin. What an extraordinary woman.
Chapter 21
“See the iron grate over the drainage canal? That’s where you’ll come out. You can still quicken a spell, yes?” Max spoke using only the half of his mouth beneath his mask. As protocol required refraining from conversation in the presence of ordinaries, every pureblood youth developed the skill early on.
“Yes.” I mimicked his trick. Though I stood slightly behind him, I was enough taller that I could easily be observed by either the spear-wielding Harrowers guarding Sila Diaglou’s gates, the bowmen on the barbican above the gate tunnel, or the five of Bayard’s warriors who surrounded us protectively, while their captain identified our party to the gate commander.
The knee-high grate to which Max referred blocked the only breach in the thick, ugly walls of Fortress Torvo. The canal had once drained water and sewage from the fortress, but that function had likely been relocated as the city grew up around the place. Weeds, dirty snow, and broken paving choked the old ditch, which disappeared into the squalid houses and snow-clogged ruins that crowded this miserable square. Riie Doloure. Last time I had been here, Harrowers had been throwing severed heads from the battlements down to their rioting fellows and fire had raged in the tenements. On that vile morning, men and women had been screaming from behind those walls, one of them Abbot Luviar, as his executioner exposed his bowels and set them afire.
Another wave of the sweats dampened my skin, my hands trembled in their bonds of silk and steel, and my own bowels threatened to betray me. What kind of idiot would broach Sila Diaglou’s fortress in shackles? And Gildas would be here. Gildas, who knew all my weaknesses.